Twenty global business leaders share the attributes that make them effective
Image: Shutterstock
We often hear that running a large company is one of the most complex jobs in the world. Business schools, strategic consultancies, headhunting firms, training providers, executive coaches all have a tendency to mystify the work of the CEO. However, effective CEOs see their jobs in much simpler terms and consider this simplification an important element of their effectiveness.
That was one of the surprising findings of a research project we undertook over the last five years. In order to understand how the CEOs themselves see their work and which factors make them successful, we interviewed a carefully assembled selection of truly international CEOs from the world’s twenty biggest economies (other findings are reported in our book CEO School: Insights From 20 Global Business Leaders).
Although our respondents come from different continents, countries, industries and types of companies, they all emphasised four essential roles of a CEO: envisioning; nominating; enabling and managing crisis. They also shared specific practices – iterative behaviour strategies – that help them play these roles. Across a series of four articles, we will expand on each of these roles and how these CEOs carry them out. We start in this article with envisioning.
Envisioning
Our 20 CEO-experts needed no prompting to talk about “vision”. It’s a topic nearly all of them raised spontaneously. “The ability to define an accurate vision is very important,” says Jean Sentenac of Axens (France). For Abdel F. Badwi, formerly of Bankers Petroleum (Canada), the “role of the CEO is mainly about vision”.
Contrary to the widespread view of a corporate vision as a picture of the future set in stone, our CEOs consider vision a work in progress. Fine-tuning and updating the vision is a never-ending process of unravelling a paradox. It entails a number of elements.
[This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge
http://knowledge.insead.edu, the portal to the latest business insights and views of The Business School of the World. Copyright INSEAD 2023]