CEOs are there to create outcomes for their stakeholders – the shareholders, staff, community or government. In many cases this is a thankless task, so how would it feel to get a letter 10 years from now congratulating you on some of the important calls you have made that put the business in a strong position. I put my mind to what those big decisions would be, and the answers might surprise you:
1. Well done for identifying that all your key people will need to be excellent in managing technology! You recognized that your technology is a key driver of business improvement. The solutions were not going to come exclusively from the IT Department, but you had to avoid the chaos of business units all purchasing their own disconnected systems.
You created development opportunities for staff to understand the relationship between the business and technology. This meant formal education in the tools of technology (enterprise architecture, business cases, service management etc), as well as on the job engagement with technology procurement, implementation and operations. Your senior managers became expert in understanding the risks and opportunities from various approaches to technology.
You have adapted your succession planning to incorporate technology competence as a key differentiator. Managing technology is a serious stream of business, as important as financial competence or technical expertise. The language of business has adapted to incorporate concepts that many of your business leaders were uninterested in 10 years ago.
2. Your approach to business process management was revolutionary and may have been a game changer. You understood that there is both value and opportunity in your company’s processes. Inside your organization, you focused on awareness and incremental improvements, using full scale process re-engineering only when the benefit clearly outweighed the risk. Your key metrics were achieved through great people running great processes on the right technology platforms.
The real difference that you made was to not stop at the edge of your business. You understood your customer’s business (and life) processes. You drove your organization to seamlessly become part of your customer’s processes. This was a challenge because of the complexity of such integrations, but it created a stickiness in your customers – you were no longer a supplier, you became part of their value chain.
3. Relationships. There it is all in that one little word, you moved relationships to the forefront of strategic thinking. You created a relationship architecture that provided clarity and direction. You reset your relationships with suppliers to provide transparency and shared success. You invested in relationships with your peers and competitors, and most importantly you encapsulated the relationship with your customers as a key value set in your organization.
You acquired and organized information to provide insights into your stakeholders. Every touch point with stakeholders was fully informed and provided them with value. All this required investment, but with savings from business process improvements and reliable internal data this was manageable. There is further to go in this area, but the lack of skilled resources has curtailed your aspirations.
My heartfelt thanks from your imaginary friend ……
We hear stories of the CEO who has creatively transformed the business, like Steve Jobs. The reality is that many transformations fail and most successful businesses strategies are around incremental improvements and intermediation. All of the above approaches can be tackled as increments, through pilots and gradually acquired competencies. You have after all got 10 years to achieve it!
Have you identified the long term initiatives that are going to differentiate your company? How long is your list and does it have anything in common with mine?