Amit Majithia, Vice President and Country Head for Wipro Limited Canada, joins co-hosts Jim Love, CIO of ITWC, and Doug Sparkes, a lecturer at the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business, for this podcast episode that delves deeply into back-casting and other techniques to help organizations prepare for an uncertain future.
Love and Sparkes open the 15-minute program with a discussion of Porter’s Five Forces, a model developed by Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, to identify and analyze the competitive forces that affect an industry and help to determine corporate strategy.
Majithia joins the discussion to share the experience of one of Wipro’s clients – a major player in Canada’s energy industry. Prior to the pandemic, this company employed four and half thousand maintenance engineers to identify and repair broken infrastructure and about 100 auditors to ensure the work was done in a safe and secure way. There was already a commitment to adopting innovation-led, agile approaches to the field experience, so when lockdowns created a backlog of various audits, the company was open to options to address the problem.
The podcast concludes with agreement among Majithia and his hosts that the essence of scenario planning is a willingness and preparedness to do things differently. Embracing partners that bring new people, new ideas, and new vision is key to planning effectively for an uncertain and most likely disruptive future.