I just finished a strategic planning session with a group of business officers of independent schools, where a comment was made that the No. 1 critical skill is the ability to scan the rapidly changing environment and develop insights about your current business.
I could not agree more!
That is exactly what IBM does with its global studies (CEO, CFO, CIO, CHRO). IBM crowdsources some amazing insights from its customers from all over the globe and distills them for us to use to form our own insights.
Sp here are the top three issues facing CEOs from IBM's latest Global CEO Study:
- Technology factors
- People skills
- Market factors
Here is my take on this research.
Technology trends = business changes
Technology is being driven by mobile, social and the cloud, and the successful organizations are rapidly adopting and figuring out these technologies. The successful CEOs are changing their leadership methods from command and control to connect and collaborate (sound familiar?) as they face the fast-moving trends of the new connected employee and customer.
People skills where ROP (Return on People) = ROI (Return on Investment)
The critical skills needed are collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, inter-connected environment. What are you doing to develop these skills in your people? We just finished a guide to developing these skills in our short video clip, titled The Bounce.
We are partnering with the AICPA and CPA2Biz on their upcoming Digital CPA Conference coming to National Harbor, Md., on Oct. 28, which will help CPA firms deal with these trends.