In 2024 CEOs will ask their people to create more value!

"You are absolutely crazy!"

Those words rang in my ears for 5 years. It was November 2008, in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis, that a decision was made to leave the comfort of a consulting business that took 10 years to build and go and create an enterprise technology start-up that focused on cloud services.

Today, that is not that crazy, but in 2008 it was a wildly radical idea. Larry Ellison, the CEO and Chairperson of Oracle Corporation and also the richest person in the world at the time, publicly stated that cloud services would never take off.

We saw something different. We saw CEO's and CIO's in the midst of financial chaos being mandated to continue to grow while being hamstrung by budget cuts. Data centres reaching capacity with no additional funds to build new ones.

We saw the Enterprise Information Technology landscape as a dinosaur, dominated by a few big players who had forgotten how to innovate and bring value to their customers. An opportunity in the midst of macroeconomic turmoil to make significant change and reap the benefits of that change.

My closest friends told me I was crazy. Joining a founding team of a startup in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the great depression. However, we knew what they didn't. History determined that the best time to start any new venture was during a depression. Microsoft, Google and Amazon all started life during times of economic downturn and poor macroeconomic conditions. Apple rose to prominence as the biggest corporation in the world as a result of the dot-com bubble bursting.

2024 is shaping up to present similar opportunities as the global financial crisis did in 2008 for many CEOs. Most Western Economies are on the brink of economic depression as Reserve Banks continue to force upward pressure on interest rates in a vain and arrogant attempt to stave off the inevitable.

Most large enterprises are tightening budgets as we head into 2024, except those CEOs who are seeing opportunity.

Ari Libarikian of McKinsey in an article titled "Why more CEO's are prioritising building new businesses" (November 2023) bears out that based on McKinseys Global Survey of New Business Building that:

"One out of every two CEOs heading into 2024 are prioritising business building as top three priority and their biggest lever for growth."

This is bucking the trend from previous economic downturns where a majority of CEOs focused on weathering the storm, focusing on resilience and prioritising medium and long-term growth.

Due to the increasing acceleration of the Generative AI wave, the huge amounts of data they all have, and the understanding that they need to keep looking around the corner and building for the future, CEOs are now asking the following questions.

Where is disruption coming from?

Where will my business find new ways to drive revenue and innovate in new markets with products and services and ways of serving customers?

Should I build a new business rather than add features and products to an existing business?

Compared to the past, these questions are wildly radical questions for CEOs of conservative organisations to be asking.

"There is a realisation amongst CEOs that resilience in today's climate comes from Radical Thinking and doing things differently."

Much like leaving the comfort of a very successful consulting business to develop a new business during the global financial crisis was seen as being nuts, many of the CEO's direct reports are thinking the same thing right now as most CEOs who are asking these questions.

I have seen this play out time and time again over thirty years of driving innovative products and services into large enterprises. The CEO sets a wildly radical vision and asks the hard questions. Two or three of their direct reports are supportive, but the majority nod in meetings and then usurp the vision when they get back to the comfort of their corner office.

This then drives a loss of vision and critical thinking down through the organisation and a significant disconnect between the CEO and their second or third level of people, and the vision is stifled.

What most CEOs don't realise is that only 10% of their people can genuinely get excited about radical ideas, and right now, CEOs need 80% of their people to be excited by Radical Ideas.

The challenge for most CEOs is that most of their direct reports and middle to upper management have never built the capabilities to be value creators. In fact, corporate structures in general are designed to weed out those types of thinkers in order to maintain order, which is essential for scaling enterprises.

If a CEO is to succeed in not only asking these hard questions, but developing plans to execute on them, then those capabilities need to be rebuilt into the organisation. The CEO needs to invest in building five core capabilities that will make their people highly resilient and exceptional value creators:

1. Radical open-mindedness: the capability to absorb difficult-to-hear ideas at speed.
2. Radical creativity: the capability to create a vision that is not constrained by how things have always been done.
3. Radical empathy: the capability to see the world from a customer's and stakeholders' eyes with compassion that can accelerate time to opportunity and reduce lost opportunity cost.
4. Radical acceptance: the capability to move through disappointment and accept that to survive and grow we must do something radically different.
5. Radical candour: the capability to deliver and receive difficult-to-hear feedback. The type of feedback required to learn quickly and challenge fixed thinking.

Without developing these capabilities and investing time into their people, 80% of their direct reports and middle to upper executives will great the hard questions with a combination of defensiveness, apathy and dismissiveness and in today's business environment, that will not only delay time to value but could spell a downward spiral that is unrecoverable to many organisations.

If CEOs are to invest in their people to support the strategies required to go beyond mid to long-term growth strategies in the current macroeconomic conditions, then these are the capabilities that need to be invested in.

2024 is the time for CEOs to double down and build the capabilities that support their ambitions.

Starting a new venture in the midst of the global financial crisis was not crazy; it was "the time" to do it. It was not a gamble; it was a calculated risk that led to building one of the most highly valued enterprise technology startups within 5 years.

One in two CEOs are now seeing that and have the ambition to take a different course of action. The question all CEOs with that ambition need to as themselves is whether their people have the capabilities to partner with them to do that.

In 2024, "Adaptability will be the Ultimate Currency."

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