The contextual CEO

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I was in the midst of some eggheads of Nigerian universities at a dinner to commemorate a special recognition of my “contribution to nation building in the areas of entrepreneurship and Job creation”. It was a very memorable night with speeches and very lively but highly intellectual discussions on why popular great businesses fail under great leaders.

So many reasons were adduced. The one that caught my attention was the question on why businesses slip in the market place in spite of the CEO’s religious adherence to all known fundamentals. Why would the success of a business not be guaranteed by the CEO who diligently leads, anticipates change, breaks all the rules, communicates, compensates for his weaknesses, fosters diversity, expresses empathy, encourages teamwork and innovation, efficiently manages logistics, hone an excellent sales and marketing expertise, puts customers before employees and instills values.

Simon Sinek, a popular American strategist tried to proffer a solution. He opined that the “Golden Ratio”, a simple mathematical relationship tool is the solution. That is, only “inspiring leaders” can use influence to give clarity to corporate vision and strategy, promote sales, create momentum as well as achieve overall value development. Also, inspiring leaders “think, act and communicate purpose, cause and belief”. They explain the purpose of the organisation and why it is easy for the business to achieve differentiating value propositions, proprietary processes and unique marketing as well as selling.

Justin Menkes in his book: “Executive Intelligence” also pointed out that businesses would only enjoy upticks and might eventually lose out in the marketplace if the CEO is not the “key source of the company’s best thinking and best answers”. Justin noted that the CEO must adequately represent the face of the organisation to the customers. He must be highly skilled to cascade, the understanding of issues and appropriate solutions. The CEO must have the power of clear thinking and be an exceptional executive. He must be brilliant and possess an instinctive business acumen. He must be equipped with the rare kind of intelligence that signposts star leadership performance. He must always see with exceptional clarity what needs to get done and how best to do it. He must be exceptional in appropriately applying insights and critical thinking in decision making. He should not just follow models. The CEO must be able to customize analysis of issues to enable him proffer appropriate and well-grounded solutions.

In today’s article, I will like to put forward in the strategy space the novel concept of the “Contextual CEO”. The leader who takes decisions based on valuable information available to him. He is the “masterful conductor” and “the very effective star”.

This type of CEO adjusts constantly to changes in the marketplace. He is not bedeviled by arrogance, bureaucracy and disappointments of failed predictions. His competitive antenna is always up. He listens astutely to customers and his principles of leadership are at deeper levels and always situationally appropriate. He is continuously and uniquely innovating with homegrown strategies and relevant technologies.

Please, note that great companies that slip always maintain boundaries through tenacious adherence to rigid KPIs and targets. They get carried away by the illusion of “safe profitability” and squeeze the margins all the time. They are happy with the euphoria of satisfying limited targets. There are no disruption of metrics and they are okay with optimizing day-to-day little successes.

Strategists refer to organisations in this category as the ones in the exploit mode. They work at the core and iterate only cautious actions. They are careful about variance, even on products and values. They strive to minimize mistakes and prioritize consistency. They are okay with getting better on upticks on day-to-day activities. They are also cautious in their execution activities and not keen on taking risks.

The opposite of this mode is the “explore mode”- Businesses that thrive on incremental innovation and all-encompassing variance. They are very adaptable, encourage creative solutions and are proudly led by agile, adroit and flexible CEOs. They are always skillfully experimenting and are always putting value-delivering entrepreneurship at work. They are not satisfied with just seeing inflows because “money is just a result”. These organisations are not static and are always challenging the status quo. Values of these organisations are user friendly and of tremendous benefits to customers.

Let me conclude with the ever-sure antidote to the now seemingly endemic daily disruptions in our marketplace. Ambidexterity is the spectacular growth revolutionizing approach to organizational development, leadership and strategy. It secures and guarantees growth in pragmatic ways that can be measured.

Sequential ambidexterity in business, is like the pendulum. The business this approach is used for, skillfully swings from the exploit to the explore modes, and back.

The contextual CEO that adapts and runs with this approach must build and operate with skilled and disciplined internal efficiency. He must optimally use the organisation’s capabilities and competencies to generate constantly expected outcomes. The CEO is the bridge between innovators and the frontline employees. He must at all times, maintain an unbroken chain of feedbacks. He is the coordinator of value-adding insights and must therefore be an epitome of collaboration, knowledge and resource sharing. He must continually grow the core with incremental innovation, creativity and be consistently inconsistent. He must regularly checkmate conflicts. He must also always extract values from the two modes, as well as test and retest ideas.

The contextual CEO is The ambidextrous CEO who must always push his boundaries on all value-delivering fronts for his organisation to remain strongly stable. His responsibility is to always skillfully disrupt existing processes and business models.

Ambidextrous approach is a pragmatic, novel and two-mode strategic model that skillfully extracts values for organisation’s critical benefits from the “exploit” and the “explore”.

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