Week 2 as CEO For One Month

Biggest Experience

Week 2 started with a bang, attending the 50 year celebration of the SwissStaffing Association. SwissStaffing is an employers’ association that promotes the industry’s interests and works actively to enhance the image of temporary work. Nicole herself is on the Board. The event begun with a General Meeting in the morning, speeches and panel discussion about the topic “The Future of Work”, followed by a gala dinner. The theme future of work stood out because of the discussion on artificial intelligence (I recently wrote another LinkedIn article on AI and sports, I encourage you to have a read). The discussion was led by Jürgen Schmidhubers, a computer scientist. Jürgen is one of the early pioneers of AI and published a paper called “Long Short-Term Memory”, for which Google used in their speech recognition software for Smartphones. I could talk about Jürgen’s captivating work for hours and hours, and especially the topic AI and HR! However, the most fascinating part of this event was seeing the amazed faces of all the 400 attendees. It made me realise that this industry is in for a very exciting future and it’s made it more clear that I want to be part of it!

Biggest Learning/ Realization

This weeks biggest realization is that the Adecco Group is such a large company with many organisations within the group, it’s a strategic challenge trying to balance them all. I mention this because this week I was able to explore Badenock & Clark, Spring Professional and Adia. Having many companies in a portfolio, makes it very important for the individual organisations not to cannibalize one another. As a business student, I’ve studied the theory of product portfolio analysis and for the first time I was able to see it in practice.

Biggest Challenge

As it’s June, it’s time for the mid-year reviews. One challenge I faced this week was trying to understand the complex accounting language. I have completed accounting courses at University, but they did not prepare me enough in order to fully keep up in the finance meeting. Of course I did not regularly want to interrupt the meeting with all my questions, however, also another learning for me this week is that it is always acceptable to ask questions!

“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge”

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Luca Feser, Adecco CEO For One Month Switzerland

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