Drive, data, and disruption: Who would make the transition?

Would the functional manager/director of today be ready to become a C-suite leader of tomorrow?

National Trades Union Congress, a rather unusual Labour Movement by any count, set up a 'startup' last year without much fanfare. It is called U Circle of Friends of the Labour Movement, a unique action community of Fortune 500 CEOs/MDs/Presidents based in Singapore, willing to share their experience and skills with our Professionals, Managers, and Executives (PMEs).

U Circle C-suite leaders often partner with the Labour Movement to help our working people grow professionally, to eventually develop a strong Singaporean leadership core.

A few key qualities of a successful C-suite leader emerged from these conversations.

First, they are highly driven customer advocates.

The reason for this is not difficult to see. In 1975, more than 80 percent of the value of S&P 500 companies was in tangible assets. Fast forward to 2015, less than 20 percent of such value is in tangible assets.

So, where is the rest of the value coming from? I'd argue it is from the unique customer relationships a company develops. Airbnb commands the market value since it owns not tangible hotel rooms but intangible customer relationships. Extend the argument to Uber, Alibaba, Grab, and I'm sure you have got the picture.

Harvard Business Review calls such companies the Network Orchestrators. They create a network of peers in which the participants interact and share in the value creation.

Hence, it is not surprising the successful CEOs and leaders I meet have a knack of being on the ground, knowing their customers intimately and clearing the service friction points.

For e.g., one leader shared that when his bank, a global consumer banking giant, gets a non-flattering customer feedback, instead of just doing service recovery, it now immediately pulls together a multifunctional crack team to solve the friction points for the customer.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon has the famous empty chair symbolising the customer in his Boardrooms. And the CEO of Lazada in Singapore declares on his LinkedIn profile that customers can directly give him the feedback and he would follow up.

Second, they are data-driven decision-makers.

Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape puts it best when he says, "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine."

Being data-driven is not something written as vision or mission, but made a part of company culture by the CEO and other leaders asking the right questions in their interactions with the rest of the team. The really successful CEOs ask incisive questions and keep dropping not-too-subtle hints that they are not looking for hunches but for real data which is indisputable, although it would have multiple layers to peel to get the insight right.

If you thought it applies only to the online/new economy businesses, you are missing the point. Thirty percent of manufacturing companies in the US now follow data-driven decision-making. Retailers such as J.C. Penney are using data analytics to place men's shoes next to men's suits rather than women's shoes, and it is having a real impact on their bottom line.

And it's not true that data-driven decision-making doesn't have heart. At last year's CMO Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Sam Ahmed shared a heartwarming campaign MasterCard initiated around Mother's Day. At the same time, their Priceless Engine ensured the enormous amount of transaction data coming from their own and online merchant websites is optimised in real time to maximise the value for the company.

Third, they are hawkish to disrupt themselves.

There are no autopilots for the visionary CEOs.

Steve Jobs made iPods effectively redundant when he introduced iPhones. The dynamic CEOs know their competitor is working in a garage or a co-working space to make them redundant. If they can't do it themselves, someone would ensure their slow evolving products are obsolete soon, and with it, so would their company.

Now, would you as the functional manager/director of today be able to make a successful transition to the C-suite leader of tomorrow?

As one of the highest ranking countries on talent competitiveness around the world, Singaporean PMEs certainly have the best chance to do so.

Yet, moving to the boardroom and eventually to a C-suite role would require those of us at middle management levels to be driven about customer centricity in the digital age, be bold in putting-forth ideas for breakthroughs in enterprise profitability (backed by data), and be excited about creating a self-imposed disruption on an everyday basis.

https://www.oceantomo.com/blog/2015/0305oceantomo2015intangibleassetmarketvalue/
https://hbr.org/2014/11/whatairbnbuberandalibabahaveincommon
https://hbr.org/2016/02/theriseofdatadrivendecisionmakingisrealbutuneven
https://fortune.com/jcpenneyreinvention/
https://global-indices.insead.edu/gtci/gtci-2015-16-report.cfm