June 2012
Big Jobs, Big Ideas
One out of seven CEOs has been on the job for less than a year. That’s a typical fraction — Booz & Company’s annual study of turnover in the chief executive’s office shows that about 14 percent of CEOs are new each year. These men and women are learning on the job; only a handful has held a CEO position before. Everyone has a stake in their success, since they have big responsibilities: The study tracks the 2,500 companies with the biggest market capitalization worldwide. Booz & Company partners Ken Favaro, Per-Ola Karlsson, and Gary L. Neilson pored over the data on CEO succession to create a portrait of this year’s incoming CEO class, then interviewed 18 veteran chiefs to get their advice on how a new leader can best navigate that crucial first year. The result, “The New CEO’s First Year,” is a must read not just for the bosses themselves but for everyone who works with them — or aspires to join them.
Growth is a top-of-mind topic for any executive, new or experienced. Organic growth, in particular, is the lifeblood of every company. In an economy still facing strong headwinds, the ability to grow organically is more crucial than ever, yet most companies struggle with it. (One very common problem: chasing rainbows that will never be caught, while the best opportunities hide in plain sight.) A superb new article in Harvard Business Review, “Creating an Organic Growth Machine,” which Ken Favaro wrote with Booz & Company’s David Meer and Samrat Sharma, shows how to build the capacity to deliver organic growth year in and year out. We’ve made special arrangements with HBR to make this article available to Booz Foresight readers free of charge for a limited time; download it now.
There’s no better way to fight a weak business environment — or exploit a strong one — than to be fit. Too often companies manage costs as if cutting were an end in itself, rather than a means to free up funds and energy to invest. They cut too deeply and leave a company weak; or they trim too timorously, lacking a clear view of which capabilities are essential to their advantage and which are not. “Is Your Company Fit for Growth?” by Booz experts Deniz Caglar, Jaya Pandrangi, and John Plansky is a powerful antidote to these misguided approaches to costs, full of case examples, frameworks, and tools that will help you understand how to reshape your spending so that you’re investing where it counts — to create value for your customers.
I’ll leave you with one more thought, but it’s a big one. Of all the world’s megatrends, digitization is both the most obvious and the least understood. Most obvious because, well, it’s obvious — present everywhere at work or at play. Least understood because the impact is so broad that it’s not always easy to see (just as a fish is unaware of the ocean in which it swims). For the last several years, Booz & Company has worked with the World Economic Forum to measure and understand digitization at the country level. What are the stages of digitization? How does it affect job creation, access to basic services, GDP growth? How can companies and governments to invest in digitization and reap its benefits? This report, “Maximizing the Impact of Digitization” written by Karim Sabbagh, Bahjat El-Darwiche, Roman Friedrich, and Milind Singh, emphasizes that companies and policy-makers need to move their thinking beyond just laying “pipes” for digital infrastructure — the policies of decades past — and give new, focused attention to the ways that infrastructure is used to create real value for companies, for citizens, and for governments themselves.
Best wishes,
Tom Stewart
Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer
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