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I begin by examining some ways in which organisations have attempted to improve their recruitment and selection procedures to minimise bias and unfair discrimination, and focus on the assessment centre as a potentially useful technique in this respect, especially for managerial selection. I go on to examine the assessment centre in more detail, including its origins, construction and uses, before discussing the strong evidence for its validity as a selection and assessment procedure. I then describe some recent British innovations in assessment centre design and practice, especially in its use for management and organisation development purposes, before discussing some of my own recent research, in collaboration with Ivan Robertson and Usha Rout, on participants' attitudes towards the use of assessment centres for selection and development purposes, including gender differences in attitudes.

This Masterclass considers the lessons of two recent important books have contrasting but complementary insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to improve the odds for developing successful innovations in response to game changes in markets.”

In Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (2017), disruptive innovation experts, Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert and Mark Johnson offer corporate leaders a “dual transformation” template for simultaneously repositioning the traditional core business in the face of disruptive change, while also creating new businesses to harness the growth potential typically unlocked by such disruption. In The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation (2017), innovation guru, David Robertson, and his collaborator, Kent Lineback, offer companies a “third way” for coping with historic market inflections by innovating around a core product to make it more compelling, rather than having to choose between attempting the radical or incremental innovation of the product itself.

The most powerful message that both books featured in this masterclass have to offer is that while it may be true, as they go on to observe, that large companies can’t innovate faster than the market, they can learn “to innovate better than the market,” through more imaginative use of legacy products, platforms and assets.

A “third way” to cope with market disruption is based on innovating around the core product, by surrounding it with a set of complementary innovations, rather than re-featuring the product itself. All of the complementary innovations operate together with the product “as a system or family to satisfy a compelling promise to the customer.”

Both Dual Transformation and The Power of Little Ideas, present different, but far from mutually exclusive, innovation strategies that can help many more great companies to survive disruptive competition.

This paper looks at ISIS, the primary care service that was set up in the London borough of Islington to improve throughput into GP prescribing services from the drug‐using population. ISIS is a service developed from a statutory and voluntary sector initiative that was developed with a GP shared‐care model in its design. It is led by a GP and two non‐medical prescribing nurses to service a population that would not stay with the service but would be managed through the project to GP prescribing services.Over the course of the first year, however, while throughput to GP services improved, the numbers were still too low for the model to work effectively. Just under half of GPs were not offering services to this population, and there were a number of more complex patients who needed to be referred to a specialist drug agency.Results from the annual audit showed that there was a population of clients who were responding well to treatment but did not have a prescribing GP to be referred on to. This paper highlights these stable patients and argues that this population can be managed in a GP‐led service such as ISIS. Revisions to service design and commissioning objectives may be required, but should be easy to implement.

The purpose of the paper is to look at how investing in the skills development of first-line leaders can improve overall business performance. First-line leaders are the largest and arguably the most important group of leaders in any organization; yet recent research shows that they are one of the most neglected in terms of training and development, which is impacting businesses’ bottom line.

This study involves literature review and Forum Europe, Middle East and Africa’s own survey data.

It is the companies that take the time to invest in developing the essential skills of their first-line leaders that will reap the rewards generated through their ability to create a highly motivated, engaged and results-driven team.

Focusses on the skills required by first-line leaders, and the five “engagement needs” they must understand in order to motivate the workforce.