Citing some social-media attacks against his Charoen Pokphand Group, Narong Chearavanont said that empowered by technology, consumers and markets had outgrown the influence of CEOs or the large companies.

“Markets are bigger than the management. Empowered by technologies, consumers are bigger than the executives,” the CP Group’s vice chairman said at the 50th-anniversary conference of the Personnel Management Association of Thailand yesterday.

“From the age of big fishes eating small fishes, now we have the Jack who kills the giants, fast fishes that eat the big fishes,” he said.

PTT chief executive officer Tevin Vongvanich said “VUCA” – which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – had become a key business challenge for CEOs.

“From the age of black-and-white TV, we have moved to colour TV. There is grey and ambiguity. Managing has become much more difficult,” he said.

Nonetheless, amid the disruptive challenges from outside, Narong said the biggest challenge for CEOs came from inside the organisations.

“Organisations need collaboration. But we have seen in many [cases] that the management is still quarrelling, being bureaucratic, or boss-centric. This is a serious challenge for HR.”

To address the challenges, human-resource managers must evolve to become the “HI” or “human intelligence”, who are brainy enough to empower their firm’s staff to contribute to their organisation’s success, Narong said.

Because things have changed so fast, CEOs can share their experiences, but cannot dictate their staff to follow in their footsteps.

“Even the culture of the group in Thailand, we can’t use that in other countries at all,” said the CP executive.

Narong said he was going to take his HR executives to visit Swisscom to learn how the Swiss telecom provider had developed a digital platform to share best practices across the organisation that every staff member can use to satisfy his or her customers’ needs.

Tevin said that since technological disruptions were expected to create both winners and losers, wealth distribution would also become a key social challenge everywhere, as income gaps created divisions in society.

“We have seen this in Thai society. People believe in the camp they belong to, regardless of the content or [factual] details. This situation is enhanced by social media, which have helped to spread the [beliefs],” he said.

Peter Wilson, chairman of the Australian Human Resources Institute, told the conference that HR should prepare their workforce for the future, as there is a prediction that half of all jobs that exist today will be gone by 2030.

Robert Garcia, vice president for global operations at the Society for Human Resource Management, spoke about the six “2017 HR predictions”

-l Culture, diversity, engagement and retention will become front-burner issues.

-Performance management will continue to be redesigned.

-More companies will deal with overwhelmed employees.

-Corporate training will be transformed and will become more important.

-Companies will redesign talent acquisition, leveraging networks, recruiting, brand reach, and new technologies.

-Talent mobility and career management strategies will become necessary in order to stay competitive.