The episode, titled “Leadership and innovation determine leather’s future success”, covers three articles: “We need to sort this out”, “We need to innovate out of the commodity trap” and “Good leadership rather than good luck”, first published on the ILM website. The articles are narrated by ILM Editor Isabella Griffiths.
In the first article, Mike Redwood writes that, following APLF’s Digital Week, major organisations in the leather industry around the world concluded that there are many good reasons to proclaim leather as an excellent material in a world facing the huge challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.
The second article discusses how, in a world grown accustomed to low prices as businesses prioritise efficiency, it is hard to avoid a commodity trap. Efficiency has been very much about reducing costs through a mix of using lower cost labour and higher levels of mechanisation in order to achieve shareholder gains.
The third article concerns leadership, which can be quite a nebulous concept and one that only gets defined when some specifically successful action is highlighted, regardless of whether the next time round the same action proves useless in a different context.
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