Versatile Amphibian

A quick post today to provide a look at the different average sizes of ExCo by industrial sector across the S&P 500. I don't know if there's anything massively surprising in the findings - businesses that tend to operate in a matrix and those that tend to have very high and complex R&D needs have larger executive teams. In any case, perhaps it'll be useful for you to see how your business compares to the average. In the second chart I look at the number of employees by ExCo member to see it there is any relationship across the sectors. There isn't, but I'll be repeating the analysis within the industries as the analysis progresses.

In order to help me understand how executive teams are configured, I’ve chosen to classify the nature of the different jobs into a number of categories. I imagine that as my analysis proceeds these will change somewhat, To keep things simple I will leave this page as the master set of definitions so that I/ you can refer back to it and keep tabs on changes. At the bottom of the post you can find a working list of roles by category. Types of executive team role: Strategic Roles , the purpose of which is to define the direction of the organisation beyond the current trading year (and ideally 10 years out - more on that another time) and to construct new structures and capabilities that will enable that direction to be achieved Revenue Creation Roles , the purpose of which is to deliver revenue in the current year Platform Operation Roles , the purpose of which is to enable value to be created from revenue by operating the processes that fulfil demand or enable it to be generat...

As promised in my update on the research I'm doing on executive team roles and configurations , here is the first deep dive into an industry. I've chosen to start with Retail for a couple of reasons. First - selfishly - I have some ongoing cases that can make use of the data. Second, retail is a nice, simple business to understand. True, many companies make it complex to manage and understand, but relative to many other sectors retail is very easy. You buy products (some or all of which you may have designed), you move them into a market in which there is demand and then you sell them for more than you bought them for. Sure, there are many twists on this ('total lifetime value', as an excuse for discounting, for example), but fundamentally, you buy, you ship, you sell for more than your costs. You would think that with such a well understood model that there would be a consistent 'best' configuration for both leadership and the organisation that those people l...

Back in February I embarked on a new research project, looking at the configuration of executive teams today and how they might change in the future . Working in London, my first thought was to use the FTSE 100 as a data set. Although it generated some interesting results and a lot of conversation (thanks to the many of you who sent me thoughts, involved me in conversations on the topic and so on), the FTSE 100 proved a slightly frustrating set of companies to research. There were two reasons for this. First, 100 companies represents too small a set to give good coverage on all industries, particularly when the natural slant in the FTSE 100 towards areas such as resources and financial services is taken into account. Second, it turns out that UK listed companies are actually relatively untransparent. Fully a quarter of the UK's largest PLCs publish no information on their management team, their biographies and their roles. Although I was able to fill in some of the gaps through ...