Are You as Smart as a CXO?

Posted May 21st, 2008 by Dennis Powell

Welcome to the Forrester IT Forum 2008 in lovely Las Vegas where it cooled down to 101 degrees last night (sans humidity). I’ll be posting a series of ‘blog-ettes’ from this forum during the week.

George F. Colony, Forrester CEO, kicked the Forum off with a 10 minute Keynote address. He immediately challenged the attendees to play “think like your CEO”. Here’s a fun game you can play at home or with your co-workers (during lunch hour please).

First, no peeking ahead to the answers please.
Second, write down the top seven success imperatives that you believe are critical to your business.

What exactly is a success imperative again? These are the seven things that your organization needs to be, to have, to do, to be successful. These can be characteristics, processes, objective…pick the top seven.

I’ll wait…

(hums to self) … still writing?

Okay, time to wrap it up.

And now you can peek.

Forrester interviewed a number of CXOs from major IT companies such as HP and Microsoft.

Here are the 7 most commonly stated successful imperatives put forth:

Compare your list to the following seven successful imperatives from Forrester customers (drum roll please)…

Getting, keeping, and building the best people
(they want their people to work brilliantly, so it helps to start with brilliant people)
Engendering collaboration
(the happy sandbox of teams and departments working together)
Reaching global markets
(”there’s gold in them thar regions”)
Increasing profit
(more gold after the bills are paid)
Building positive culture
(a great place to work means motivated workers)
Customers, customers, customers
(meaning not just more, but well-cared for, customers)
Innovation
(hmmm…isn’t this risky? More below…)

How many of your lists read like the preceding?
Now tell me what’s missing from this list…

what specific WORD is missing from this list…

come on, it’ll come to you…
(hint, its the “t-word” that dominates our lives and likely appeared on your list)…

Can you say, “Technology”?

That’s right, nowhere to be found. Why is that? Because these CXOs are thinking BT instead of IT. Business Technology instead of Information Technology. They need to look at things from the business satisfaction perspective, hence the SIs about ‘culture’, collaboration, customers…and innovation.

Why the importance of innovation? After all, once you’ve found a working formula, does it pay to introduce risk? CXOs must keep organizations together, moving toward goals, working as a team (process, guidelines, best practices…) - but they also realize, as this list shows, that innovation helps them stay ahead of the pack. A tough balancing act, but a subject to be covered in depth this week at Forrester’s Forum.

I’ll discuss the importance innovation in my next blog.