Versatile Amphibian

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. ...

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 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...