Versatile Amphibian

  “Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.” Kyle Reese, The Terminator One of the common criticisms of executive teams that fail to achieve good outcomes is that they failed to see a problem that later crippled their organisation. Built into this criticism is an implicit assumption that executives can both see everything to which their organisation is exposed and can understand that data point in the context of every other one. Hindsight is a fine thing. Executive teams are not like Skynet’s CPU. They are collections of human beings and subject to human failings. It is, however, somewhat useful to imagine the executive team as a processor, sitting at the centre of an information system. This information system is built to an information architecture, which gover

A few years ago a friend of mine asked me if I had any thoughts about a leadership team restructure he was contemplating. Instinctively I knew that I must have thoughts, after all, I’ve dedicated a big chunk of my 15-year professional career to helping executives set their strategies. Surely I must have some pithy advice on how to put those executives together into some kind of coherent order? But I was stumped. And it turned out that I wasn’t alone. A magical mystery tour through my smartest colleagues turned up a few rules of thumb, but little in the way of theory. So I did what all management consultants do and turned to Google and HBR. Here again, I drew a blank. Although I found many interesting articles and opinions about aspects of executive leadership and governance, I failed to turn up anything seminal about structure and practices. Hell, I failed to turn up anything conceptual, let alone Executive Team Configuration For Dummies. That was late 2018. After a short intermission

As you can imagine, I've been having a great many conversations with business leaders about the potential impact of the pandemic. A common thread is the idea that the working environment will change forever as people realise the benefits (or rather, lack of dis-benefits) of working from home. One of the many thoughts that this has sparked for me is whether this crisis will be the beginning of the end of the Chief Human Resources Officer as an executive role. The CHRO has long been a puzzling thing to me. The challenge lies in the blend of roles that sit within the Human Resources silo. My observation over the years is that these functions are in general very operational, dealing with the mechanics of employee relations, recruitment, training, internal communications and so on. Because of the operational focus of much of the people-base there is a general lack of high quality strategic thinking and high impact action to turn an organisation's people into a competitive advantag

The other day I (finally) published the long-promised analysis on the origins of executive level  Chief Strategy Officers  in an attempt to understand the philosophies on strategy that underpin the decision-making of major businesses. This post is a follow-up that looks at another type of Strategic Role on the Executive Team, the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). The original idea behind the Chief Digital Officer was to create an executive-level change agent. The change in question was initially the addition of digital consumer engagement and commerce and, in some businesses the creation of hybrid products and services that had an internet-delivered component in addition to the traditional physical product or service. Over time, this role has morphed in the best organisations such that the CDO is effectively a Chief Transformation Officer, stewarding the business model, cultural, operational and technological change from an Industrial Economy base to a Digital Economy one. I am old

I've updated my analysis of the career path of Executive Strategy professionals with an additional piece of information - their specific role on the ExCo. As you can see, strategy is more often than not combined with other roles, in particular Corporate Development... because M&A is strategic, of course... ...or is M&A just a mechanism to enact strategy and does wrapping the two roles together make large businesses more focused on acquisition rather than organic growth? Answers on a postcard!

Here's a follow up to my earlier post on the starting point of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) careers in the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies - a visualisation of two steps in their careers: their first employer or job and the job they had before they got their current position. Lots of work went into this... so any insights that you glean from the visualisation would be great to hear about :). The CSO is a crucial strategic role on the executive (!) and the owner of the tone and philosophy of decision making across much of the business, knowingly or unknowingly. Scrutiny of their experience in defining the process and language of strategic management is therefore appropriate not just amongst their executive peers, but in my view amongst shareholders. The days when being very smart and able to analyse large amounts of data were enough to be a CSO are basically gone... has the profession moved on enough to cope?