Dr Catriona Wallace shares profoundly personal experiences of the destruction of millions of hectares of farmland in Australia – including her own – and how stronger gender diversity in leadership can assist in helping combat the new reality that faces Australia.

Anyone can have a ‘good time’ if they borrow and spend like the proverbial drunken sailor, but as we all know, such action is not sustainable. It cannot go on forever given that one day the money will run out and the debt will have to be repaid.

Our expert economist and social commentator Stephen Koukoulas explores the question of how sustainable is our super with an aging population.

 It's a pivotal time in education. For hundreds of years students have sat in classes having knowledge imparted to them by teachers. Now, from high school, often earlier, virtually every student carries a device from which they can find out pretty much anything in a matter of seconds. 

Based on the work we've been doing in real estate the last couple of years, I think it's safe to say it's a pretty interesting time to be in the real estate business right now. I want to provoke you to think for a moment around whether we've got our eye on the right ball that's in the air right now.

The real estate industry is changing. There's all this new technology. Things are constantly shifting and moving and markets are going up and down. It can create anxiety. It can create fear.

Dr. Catriona Wallace has established herself as the innovative go-to expert for optimizing customer experience. As a result, she's the most natural authority to consult with when looking at ways to introduce emerging technologies into business.

As old as the real estate business itself is the question of how to make the acquisition of real estate the easiest to be funded and thus the easiest to access for the largest number of people possible. Answering those questions, stakeholders sometimes had been extremely creative. It could be a nation that subsidized the purchase of real estate through tax credits. This happened e. g. with East-German real estate after the reunification of Germany.  25 years later, with the emerging fin-tech boom and acceptance, crowd-funding was born. It did not take long and the first real estate acquisition was funded by a crowdfunding concept. 

Things are brewing in the housing market: Having been hit hard under the weight of a property glut, record low wages growth, tighter credit from the banks and the Reserve Bank refusing to cut interest rates despite troubling economic conditions, house prices around the bulk of Australia fell sharply from around the middle of 2017 through to the middle of 2019.

I was living in the Amazon with the Uchupiamonas for several years. We were developing our ecolodge Chalalan in the heart of the Madidi Jungle. In the process, I became one of them - initiated as an Uchupiamona myself. I became indigenous.

Some leaders think it’s their job to have all the ideas. The best leaders understand that good ideas can come from anyone, from the CEO to the receptionist, and that it is often the people down the ladder dealing with customers and using systems every day, who know where improvement is needed. 

As a speaker, one of my specialties is speaking about creating a courageous culture. We know in this day and age that culture is perhaps more important than strategy. A great strategy without a great culture doesn't create results.

Many organizations talk about the importance of taking risks, being bold and being adventurous. They realize that they need to experience failure and be innovative in order to stay at the cutting edge in the face of disruption. The verbiage of this is common in the business landscape. We know we need to fail fast and fail frequently. The reality is that very few organizations are actually following through and seeing this become a part of the everyday experience or culture within an organization. 

Change is imperative, yet many organizations’ transformation initiatives meet numerous setbacks, failures or delays. Conversely, those that succeed are eventually confronted with the reality that they are not advancing as desired. At best, these transformations put the organizations on par with newer and more agile rivals. As the pace of change accelerates, organizations must find strategies for enhancing growth. This creates the need to establish agility and digital capacities to effectively compete with other organizations in a hyper-competitive environment. 

I think it's safe to say that culture is one of the most durable topics in business conversations. It's one of the most studied topics and it's a topic that occupies a lot of our headspace as leaders in business as we think about what it's like to create an organization.

International Speaker Hall of Fame presenter Lisa McInnes-Smith has an extraordinary capacity to inspire leaders to make tangible shifts in behaviour.

By helping global organizations recognize and transform behaviors that unlock or block strategic goals, Keith Ferrazzi helps create new, more profitable habits throughout every level of the businesses he works with.

Dominic Thurbon has cracked code for making change happen. With the ultimate formula to drive innovation, and future-proof your leadership. The behavioural impact you have now is the fundamental determinant of the quality of success of your organisation.

In this uncertain future largely driven by the arrival of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, let's think about what I see as the most important skills for leaders to be considering.

The digital revolution is causing an enormous change in reshaping leadership styles. These changes include swift and far-reaching technological changes, a shift from physical attributes towards knowledge, more dispersed and less hierarchical forms of organization and globalization that supports the spread of information.

Where do we look for leaders? What do we expect of them? Where are the men and women with integrity, imagination, compassion, vision and the ability to transmit that vision in a way that will galvanise the nation?