Executive Leadership

Succeeding in a Recession
Executive Leadership

Rethink Your Strategy
An Urgent Memo to the CEO

If you are a chief executive officer, a business unit general manager, or a line officer in any major company around the world, the events of October 2008 should cause you to rethink the strategy for your business. The purpose of this article is to explain why this is so important and what to do next.

As a business leader, you need to readjust your mind-set for a future that looks very different than it did just a few months ago. In the last decade, there have been three bubbles in rapid succession—in Internet and telecom companies, real estate, and commodity prices. During bubbles, the pressures on the strong and the weak are the same: to ride the wave of growth, regardless of whether it’s based on permanent value or transient speculation. But the speculative bubbles have burst, and now, the most critical thing is to see the dynamics clearly—not as an investor, but as a decision maker with a company to steer.

Given the potential for discontinuous changes in the structure of your industry, playing your hand well means changing your stance. It also means preparing your company to move aggressively to seize strategic opportunities. These opportunities will likely present themselves sooner rather than later. That’s why the preparation cannot be postponed. The prescriptions for the weak are different from those for the strong.

View the complete Memo to the CEO (496 kb)

CEO Succession 2008: Stability in the Storm

Chief executives in 2008 showed remarkable resistance to the economic crisis—with turnover rates actually declining in the U.S. and Europe—according to Booz & Company's annual study of CEO turnover.

View the complete file CEO Succession 2008 (374 kb)

Leadership Lessons and the Economic Crisis
Where We've Come from and Where We're Headed

The financial crisis has discredited the leadership and management practices of financial institutions, triggering a wave of thinking and experimentation about what could and should replace them. This Perspective puts this process in the context of trends in leadership over the past 30 years, and predicts some of the new and back-to-basics actions we can anticipate. It highlights the rapid changes in board practices and articulates some clear direction for change both in the structure for governance and management, and in the characteristics that leaders will have to display.

View the complete file Leadership Lessons and the Economic Crisis (249 kb)

The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution

Research shows that enterprises fail at execution because they go straight to structural reorganization and neglect the most powerful drivers of effectiveness— decision rights and information flow.

Read the full article at HBR.org >