Study Finds CEOs Focusing on Connecting & Collaborating
Posted on Wed, May 30, 2012
In the IBM 2012 Global CEO Study, over 1,700 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders worldwide were interviewed about their future plans and challenges in an increasingly competitive and connected economy. The theme of the 2012 study was collaboration and connectivity – with companies laser-focused on forging closer connections with customers, partners, and employees.
According to the study, across all aspects of their organization, CEOs are most focused on gaining deeper insights about their customers with seven out of every ten CEOs making significant investments in their organizations' ability to glean meaningful customer insights from available data. “Given the data explosion most organizations are facing, CEOs recognize the need for more sophisticated business analytics to mine the data being tracked online, on mobile phones and social media sites,” the study states. An organization’s ability to drive value from data is strongly correlated with performance.
The IBM study underscores that outperforming organizations are twice as good as underperformers at accessing and drawing insights from data. Outperformers are also 84 percent better at translating those insights into real action.
The study also found that CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment. CEOs see technology as being a critical enabler and more than half of CEOs surveyed (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations, while 52 percent are shifting their attention to promoting great internal collaboration via high-value employee networks and the like.
Access the IBM 2012 Global CEO Study here.