Success Formula 2011: Turning Complexity into Opportunity

To flourish in this increasingly difficult climate, CEOs are looking for creativity in their executive teams and advisors.

In fact, the authors of a vast new IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs across the globe say top executives now believe creativity rivals integrity as the single most important quality in a leader.

“Creative” leaders will need to be more comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To motivate and communicate with a new generation of followers and stakeholders, they will need to embrace, in the words of one unnamed professional services CEO in the U.S., “disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention.”

The new mission of tomorrow’s top leaders will be two-fold:

1.    Reinvent customer relationships – 84% of U.S. CEOs say “getting connected” to better understand, predict and give customers what they really want is their top priority. That’s somewhat less than the global average. IBM suggests that some U.S. CEOs may be “failing to capitalize fully on the customer data they collect.”

2.    Build operating dexterity – 36% of U.S. CEOs are focusing on simplifying their products and operations, chiefly, it seems, through continued cost-cutting. Some 64% of U.S. CEOs “are intent on reducing their fixed and increasing their variable costs, so that they can rapidly scale up or down.” In most other nations, CEOs are emphasizing re-thinking their systems over continued cost-cutting.

Ignoring complexity is no longer an option for CEOs, CFOs and other finance and accounting professionals. Will you allow complexity to strangle improvement, crush morale, or undermine profitability?

The bottom-line question is how will you and your organization respond? How will you develop “the creative leadership, customer relationships and operating dexterity” to turn complexity into a competitive advantage?

Posted on December 17, 2010