The “2010 Global IBM CEO Study” was recently published, it’s one of the largest one-on-one CEO interview studies, surveying 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders from 60 countries and across 33 industries. The four primary findings of this year’s survey are as follows:
- Today’s complexity is only expected to rise and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organisations we call them ‘Standouts’ has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
- Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organisations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realise their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
- The most successful organisations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number one priority.
- Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organisations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.
After reviewing the findings what becomes clear that there is an overarching theme, the is the extent to which the economic downturn has affected customers, business and society. The world will not simply go back to “business as usual” after we recover from the economic downturn. The world has undergoing a significant paradigm shift and it will never be the same.
As we move towards a recovery in the world economy, leaders world-wide are experiencing high levels of complexity and uncertainty where “eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex and fewer than half believe they know how to deal with it successfully.” This environment creates an urgent need for leadership. Given this, the survey explored what CEOs consider to be the most important leadership qualities that would be required over the next five years, the results are illustrated below.
CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality over the next five years…
Creativity is essential when uncertainty is high and where the future is expected to be a significant departure from what we’ve known in the past. When uncertainty is high you cannot just repeat the successful practices of the past and expect similar results. You will need to find new ways of thinking, new ways of operating and new ways of behaving. The IBM survey puts it this way…
“Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different, but CEOs elaborated. Creativity is the basis for ‘disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention,’ a Professional Services CEO in the United States told us. In addition this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. Leaders, they said, must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing experimentation… It’s not that CEOs are just now becoming aware of the importance of creativity they have long been aware of the need to innovate their products, their processes and their customers’ experiences. Even in 2004, CEOs were telling us that ‘CEOs the world over were refocused on growth and they viewed innovation as the way to get there.’ But today, creativity itself has been elevated to a leadership style. Traditional approaches to managing organisations need fresh ideas, ideas that are intended to disrupt the status quo.”
It seems that we are entering a period that places a premium on effective leadership. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to re-invent how we choose to approach our life and work. These are exciting times indeed…!
- What are you doing in response to this increased demand for leadership?
- Are you re-examining your existing leadership practices?
- Are you experimenting with new approaches, new paradigms, new ways of working? If not, why?
Technorati Tags: Creative, Innovation, Leadership, Research, IBM, 2010, Integrity, Management, Business, CEO
Related posts:
drorengel (droren...
gdenni
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I think you missed one.
Abundance.
I’m changing the rules of the business game so abundant leaders achieve success and significance for themselves and others, including their competition.
I totally agree about creativity. The MFA is the new MBA.
The interesting thing about creativity is that, in its origins, it isn’t a cognitive experience. Nor is it a creative experience. Creativity is a social experience. If you think about it, no great innovation is born in isolation from community. Great breakthroughs happen in the context of great relationships. Especially those born from great differences. Conflict is the raw material of innovation, and in order to have great creativity, you must have relationships that can be solid containers of conflict. CEOs who know this know how to build masterful relationships with those on their teams, as well as their key stakeholders outside their orgainizations are those that foster the farthest reaching creativity.
Not surprisingly, most research today (and our work with CEOs and organizations would bear this out) would suggest that the greatest antidote to complexity isn’t “De-complexifying” the organization (as if that were possible). The greatest antidote to complexity is trust. The endless amount of complexity proliferation today – proliferated by accelerated technologies, global markets, doing more with less, enhanced productivity tools, and the networks of relationships within organizations required to meet countless customer demands – all point to the fact that trust-based relationships are the only valid scaffolding that can effectively manage the inordinate amount of complexity that will only increase in the decade ahead.
Traditional approaches to “complexity reduction” – process engineering, de-layering, technology, matrix structures, training, etc – have short lived ability to simplify the world of organizations. To amplify the necessary creativity CEOs and their organizations will need to compete successfully in the next decade, they will need to ensure that the deep levels of trust needed to “glue” together the best of ideas and unleash the boundary-pushing ideas safely is fully present and celebrated.
Leadershp has long been something we do with people – in the context of meaningful relationships – and was never something we do to people or for people. The complexity of the world, along with an emerging generation of leaders insisting on such relationships. Leaders who come to understand this will do just fine in the face of rising complexity and will unleash unimaginable creativity within their organizations.
Thanks for encapsulating that study, George. I’d bet that “creativity” isn’t on the top of most leadership assesmsents or is a key component in most executive leadership programs. I would venture a guess that it soon will be. And, there will be a number of ways in which it might be tackled. I’m afraid that too many will have a one-sided take on what is required. I see at least three critical pieces hinted at by our posts here:
1. The technical/rational view – provide them with the process-related or technical skills to make it happen.
2. The realtionships/dilog view (which I am a huge proponent of; I truly enjoyed and agree with Ron’s post): Deep connections yield deep insights; deep insights yield significant “aha’s” and new worldviews.
3. The self view. What core capacities are needed for a leader to be creative, humble, have an expansive view, and otherwise demonstrate the qualities listed in the Global IBM CEO study? I suggest one – the leader’s capacity to be mindul. My research has shown that a mindful leader is accepting, curious, and humble and has the capacity to selflessly and compassionately connect with others in a desire to bring about the best and/or engender change.
I am hopeful that future posts might extend this list/line of thinking.
Rosaria (Ria) Hawkins, PhD
http://www.themindfulleadershipblog.com
I totally agree with this post. Very informative.
Yep! Creativity rules!
Another aspect here is that creativity is strongly needed to be able to lead the young ones that are no still attending school. I have read a few books about gen Y. I have also lead a few gen Y’s and they are all different. It is neccessary for me as a leader to be creative and find my ways to get them to be effective.
Good post.
I find it interesting that Integrity, while near the top, is over taken by creativity. I believe this is relevant to innovation, essential to a company’s growth. Integrity is most relevant to TRUST we are seeing as an essential quality in lieu of recent news headlines. Turnover is a majoe expense and people are an asset. Preparing ourselves today is critical in order to compete tomorrow.
I don’t agree that it is creativity. I believe it is inquiry. The best leaders based on my research spend 70 to 80 percent of their time asking questions. they do this to gain alignment, engagement and accountability. By asking questions from a place of not knowing they engender trust by trusting their people, and an open adaptable posture that may feel like creativity. many if not all of those items measured in your survey happen when the leader ask. In my book Just Ask Leadership (McGraw Hill) I interview over 100 exceptional leaders and they seem to agree with Peter Drucker on this, “The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.”
Interesting that creativity came out number one. So what changes will our organizations be required to make in order to foster this quality? We’ve worked for years on getting process right — creativity can be a messy experience. I’d be curious to hear commentary from Six Sigma people.
This is a great summary. Thanks for pulling the main points. I do wonder if the study is revealing anything particularly new. Complexity has always been here, as has the need for creativity, trust, integrity, inquiry and so on. If the balance changes from year to year by a few percentage points is that a major finding? A stunning new development? Should it deeply shape how a person views the work of his or her personal leadership growth? When these things are all tied to percentage points and profits, framed in terms of corporate survival, it seems to me the natural outcome are programs. And this in turn stultifies the response even farther, leading to additional forms of political correctness and compliance. How is our “creativity” program doing? How are we doing on our “trust” initiative? These external qualities (and I am a big believer in both qualities and have staked my career on them), when reified into agents of corporate success, become techniques, not realities. As such, the more things seem to change, the more the formula (for organizations seeking formulas) actually remains the same. The alternative is much deeper and less rationalized, perhaps not so easily encapsulated, nor so abstracted from the real experiences of those doing the work.
In this fast-changing times of doing business, I agree that Creativity should be on top of the list of qualities of a good leader. What has been effective in the past years might not be effective tomorrow, so creative leaders tend to weigh in the methods used as well as the results obtained in the past and then try to ‘custom-fit’ it to the present situation to obtain the best possible results. Not all company CEOs can be as creative and as flexible as that. Integrity and Influence can put you to the top but Creativity makes you stay on top.
I think one of the most important aspects of being a leader is being in the right place at the right time. Don’t underestimate the need to have luck on your side. I have seen some truly great individuals never rise to the position of leader simply because of bad timing. I have also seen incompetent leaders rise through the ranks quickly because they were at the right place at the right time.
{ 2 trackbacks }