All roads today lead to Eko Hotels and Suites on Victoria Island in Lagos for the 2016 annual CEO Forum Nigeria, a thought leadership initiative organised by BusinessDay, Nigeria’s leading financial and business newspaper, which is also marking its 15 years of publishing the title, this month.
This year’s forum with the broad theme, ‘Leading in a Changing World’, will have top CEOs, investors, decision makers and government officials, including Rotimi Amaechi, Minister of Transport, as special guest of honour in attendance.
Confirmed speakers at this year’s forum include Efosa Ojomo of Harvard Business School and Rich Lesser, global CEO, The Boston Consulting Group, (BCG) who is the keynote speaker.
Lesser will speak on the global economic outlook and what it means for CEOs in Nigeria, drawing from BCG’s work across the globe, and he will in particular, highlight trends that BCG’s leading consultants are seeing around the world and how Nigerian CEOs should be responding.
On the importance of the forum Ojomo said: “Innovation is vital to growing productivity and improving the quality of life of Nigerians. Businesses play a big role in driving innovation and providing high quality jobs that transform an economy.”
This year’s forum is expected to attract over 120 leading CEOs of Nigeria’s top companies for a whole day of dialogue around key challenges they face in a market like Nigeria. A key highlight at the forum today, will be the special sector representative session called ‘CEOs-in-Conversation,’ involving a select group of leading and economy-important CEOs, who come together to engage a number of issues surrounding developments in their industries/sectors.
Some of the sectors include oil & gas, agriculture, manufacturing, power, banking and finance, rail transportation, health and education.
This year’s conversation promises to be an interesting one, as it is coming at a time of major changes to the way the economy operates and is being run.
In the last seven years that the CEO Forum Nigeria has held, it has sought to achieve various major objectives, including knowledge sharing – gaining a rich array of insights and knowledge to help enhance effectiveness and ability to create value for organisations.
Other objectives include leadership development – helping to inspire and cultivate leadership skills that will positively impact the development of Nigeria. It has also provided a unique and exclusive platform for networking with other participants, presenters and panelists in a non-competitive environment to build enduring and impactful professional and personal relationships.
Past speakers at the forum include, Michael Porter, the world acclaimed economist and researcher at Harvard Business School, who has brought economic theory and strategy concepts to bear on many of the most challenging problems facing corporations, economies and societies; Paul Collier, professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford; Richard Ingleton, the Global CEO of TNS, one of the World’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups and Babatunde Fashola, former governor of Lagos State.
Others that have attended the CEO Forum in the past are Dominic Barton, McKinsey Global CEO; Thilo Mannhardt, member, McKinsey Global Board of Directors; Aliko Dangote President/CEO Dangote Group; Wale Tinubu GMD/CEO, Oando Group; Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, former governor, Central Bank of Nigeria and Michael Halbye Director & Regional Head of EMEA, McKinsey & Co.
Daniel Obi
