How is today’s CEO thinking about corporate culture and business success differently than yesterday’s leader? A new report from brand consultancy firm Wolff Olins surveyed 43 global CEOs to learn how their careers have been influenced by technology, new ways to educate staff, and a perspective shift that has revolutionized the position.
Interviewed CEOs include AOL’s Tim Amstrong, Tata Motors’ Ranjit Yadav, D. Shiv Kumar of PepsiCo, John Hughes of PwC, Anthony Jenkins of Barclay and many more.
B2BNN will cover the report’s key findings on Monday, but for your weekend reading we wanted to share the 10 most intriguing quotes from the 2015 Wolff Olins Leadership Report.
These quotes come from the surveyed CEOs and the report’s writers:
“Leaders…are learning to be less the visionary, less the sage, less the objective-setter, and more the shaper, the connector, the questioner.” -Wolff Olins Leadership Report
“I’ve learned to focus much less on keeping people on their toes to create short-term performance improvements, because it leaves a fragile organisation behind.” -Jeff Dodds, CEO, Tele2
“To create the space for your team to fail without allowing sloppiness is really hard – it takes a really deep-thinking leader.” -François Muscovici, White Water Group
“If design thinking is about moving from an existing situation to a better one, then the CEO is designer-in-chief.” -Marty Neumeier, Liquid Agency
“The key is not to tell people what to do but to teach them how to aspire.” -Sanjay Reddy, GVK
“Distributed leadership allows new answers to emerge and be actioned without the CEO there to call it. Increasingly, leaders are letting teams around the organisation use their own specialised or local knowledge to try things out.” -Wolff Olins Leadership Report
“I believe that getting into the market [with new products] and exploring is the only way to learn: it should be small teams and fast sprints with a tolerance for messy processes.” -Brian Kelly, Keurig Green Mountain
“What we do is not very important to people – it’s what we enable them to do. So for us purpose injects both focus and humility.” -Antony Jenkins, Barclays
“If every decision has to go to the CEO then clearly we are not going to grow as fast.” -Iyad Malas, Majid Al Futtaim
“Leaders need to trust and accept that people will work for them only on their own terms. And often that actually enhances the environment.” -Wolff Olins Leadership Report
Photo of Muhtar Kent, Coca-Cola CEO, via Coca-Cola Co.
