Welcome to BizCom 2010!

Thank you for joining the first Business Complexity and the Global Leader Conference at Suffolk University. In keeping with our mission to educate successful leaders of global business and public service, the Sawyer Business School is committed to continually challenging itself and its faculty to expand our thinking and teaching to ensure a culture of learning and leadership.

According to a recent IBM survey of 1,500 global leaders, complexity was cited as the most significant issue facing leaders today. Traditional tools and methodologies are no longer sufficient to support effective leaders. As society becomes increasingly global, and the pace of social and technological change and the level of interconnectivity increase, our systems are also growing in complexity. There is no doubt that understanding the organization and the economy as a complex and fluid system is one of the most important abilities for effective leaders today.

While complexity science is not new, and is increasingly considered to be essential for understanding our natural and social world, business schools are only just beginning to incorporate a comprehension of complex systems into the core of their curriculum. Recognizing that business leaders must acquire the necessary competencies to harness this complexity, the Sawyer Business School has the distinct privilege of bringing together scholars and business leaders from around the globe to share their knowledge. In an effort to prepare current and future leaders for what Steven Hawking has referred to as "the century of complexity," the Business Complexity and the Global Leader Conference was born to facilitate this need. Thank you for joining us at Suffolk and challenging us to think "complexity."

Enjoy!