Versatile Amphibian

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'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?

I realise it's been a while since I've had time to blog. The second half of last year turned out a bit busy. I'm putting it down to a sudden realisation in a lot of Executive teams that creative destruction applies to them too. Anyhow, here's a quick first post on something I promised last year - an analysis of where Executive Level Chief Strategy Directors start their careers. As you can see, Strategy Consulting is the most common starting point for CSOs, but perhaps not as dominant as I'd expected - just over 20% of the most senior strategists in the S&P 500 and FTSE 100 started there. More than half of those came from McKinsey, with the remainder evenly split between BCG, Bain and Monitor. Why did I do this analysis? Primarily because I'm interested in how businesses set up their strategic decision-making culture. For me, the main role of the strategist is to facilitate the process of developing, realising and reflecting on strategic decisions. To ...