Versatile Amphibian

This is the fourth part of a thought experiment I’m performing about the future makeup of executive teams. If you’ve skipped them, here are parts one , two and three . One of the motifs that I use in the book to describe the role of leaders in the Digital Economy is the famous Hero’s Journey. Although it may seem a strange thing to reference, in reality that flow of comfort, storm clouds, challenges, fall and redemption is a useful metaphor for the journey that organisations go for. No leader is more exposed to this journey than the CEO. Interestingly though, it feels to me that the average CEO fails to engage in one critical part of the Hero’s Journey: assembling their party. Having talked about the kind of people that the CEO might want around him or her to defend their core business and take the offensive, we should now think about the way those perspectives can be combined to best effect. Of course, the combination of people that a leader wants around them is very de...

In the last two posts, I’ve presented an analysis of the makeup of executive leadership teams in the FTSE 100, then suggested some new roles that might help CEOs defend their cash cows as they commoditise and are affected by potential substitutes. In this post I’ll suggest some new perspectives that will enable CEOs to go on the offensive, to shape new markets and win within them. The best defence, as the adage goes, is a good offense. This is obviously complete rubbish, but it sounds great, so I’m going to give it air time. It’s also true in my mind that the majority of the roles that we need relate to shaping and building the future business. Let’s cover them in that order. We need to understand the environment in order to effect change within it. This suggests to me that we need to have someone in every decision who has a distinct mandate to seek to map out what could happen in the future in more specific terms than ‘change will happen’. One could see this role as a Chief E...

In my last post , I summarised the findings of my analysis of the composition of executive leadership teams in the FTSE 100, having first set out some basic principles for the role of that team in the present environment. You can find that content here. Today I’m going to start to look at possible roles on an ideal future ExCo, leading onto future essays on orthodox and unorthodox compositions and finally on the resulting impact those compositions will have on decision-making flows. To look at roles, we first need to think about the demands that the present environment is placing on leaders. The world has always been a complex place to do business in. The difference today is that we are far more aware of that complexity than we have been in previous generations and our ability to generate and suffer from change is exponentially greater than it has been before. We are also nearing the end of the latest techno-economic revolution – in information technology – which began in 1971...

One of the central themes of the book (I am going to mention “the book” a lot in the coming weeks and months!) is the form of leadership required to win in the current environment and how those leaders should make decisions.  Given the constraints of a sensibly-long book, I was only able explore certain aspects of the topic. One piece I removed because it felt too much like conjecture relates to the form of corporate executive teams. My incoming thesis is that in general executive management teams have the wrong skills and perspectives to effectively guide their organisations in times of uncertainty. This is a function of a number of things: A lack of clarity about the actual purpose of the executive team The wrong composition of the leadership team, resulting in an inappropriate mix of skills and perspectives The wrong type of executives being selected to participate in executive leadership Each of these is covered to an extent in ‘Art and Science…’ but over...