“Early in my career, I wondered how to develop a vision and a strategy,” DSM CEO Feike Sijbesma says in Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra‘s wonderful book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
“Do I sit in my study and yell, ‘Eureka! I have it?”
Unlikely.
What did Feike do instead? “I started reading more about all kinds of subjects, including unrelated subjects, to combine the unrelated things into something new,” he remembers. “Not only in technical innovation but also in business.”
What else? “I also started traveling a lot and building a network, connecting with a lot of people in business, science, and society.”
These conversations with industry experts, including those in the Middle East, led him to believe DSM would never be able to compete with the oil and chemical majors.
Through his involvement with the United Nations, he learned about opportunities in an entirely new area of sustainable development and healthy food.
These realizations led to the total transformation of DSM over the next fifteen years.
“That’s how we get the idea to move out of petrochemicals and use the proceeds to move to nutrition and health,” he says.
2: For LEGO CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, insights came from an altogether different group: the adult LEGO fan community.
“They were viewed as a gray market and a little bit of a weird group,” he recalls.
“They got together every year and so I joined them for one of their conferences. I camped there for six days and just had endless conversations with five to six hundred people.”
These dialogs built trust between the CEO and this group of passionate stakeholders. “They kept sending me emails and inputs and so on,” he remembers. “If I could deliver something that satisfied them, I could deliver something that satisfied the average user as well. They were the credibility.”
Today, LEGO’s adult user community includes more than one million people and totals 30 percent of LEGO’s global business.
3: “The best CEOs hardwire their view of the future into their company’s strategic planning,” Carolyn, Scott, and Vik write.
Says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google: “I think about our mission and the fundamental trends we’re seeing, and based on that I write down the five to ten themes that we really want to execute on well.”
Sundar then works with his leadership team and other associates to “sharpen his themes,” the authors write. “With those ideas in mind, each part of the organization develops a set of objectives and key results (OKRs) that are ambitious and shared internally.”
He then integrates the themes into all of his review conversations: “If ‘Asia Pacific–first’ is one of our five themes,” he says, “I could be in a YouTube review and probe the team: ‘Can you tell me how you’re solving for Asia Pacific first?’ ”
Again, it starts with having a clear vision of the future.
Italian utility Enel‘s CEO Francesco Starace believed that renewable energy would grow quickly, be highly competitive, and be global. He was confident that “the future will bring along a compression of time, not an elongation of it.”
These beliefs led him to move “away from making large capital investments in thermal and nuclear power plants to a more granular approach of multiple investments aimed at renewables that have no more than three years of full development and construction time.”
“By doing so, Enel has grown into the world’s largest private renewable energy provider and the largest utility in Europe by market cap.”
Another example is GM’s Mary Barra, who made strategic moves based on the four trends she sees transforming mobility: electrification, autonomy, connectivity, and sharing.
Having a vision for the future and making strategic moves to capitalize on that future requires courage. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says: “Five years ago, people were saying, ‘Oh, this will never work.’ So it’s a lonely place.”
More tomorrow.
___________________________
Reflection: Why is foresight the “lead” in “leader”? What is my view of the future of my industry?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above.
What did you think of this post?
