WHY in Organisations: The Purpose and Rise of the CYO.

The C-Suite of today is filled with CXOs. The curious part is, even with all of them, organisations are struggling to manage the future. In the ever changing future economy we need a new breed of leaders who will be the gate keepers of the purpose of the organisations. And they are, CYOs.

Market conditions were bad. My new CEO was the CFO. All through his career till becoming the CFO he was a consultant and his job was to look through the maze of numbers and find out what made more arithmetic sense. A few of these made sense to me as a management trainee, but most did not. Most senior executives felt the same too. Marketing expenses were chopped off and sales realisations were made forefront while cutting down their expense heads. He made everyone who had aspirations to work with this oil behemoth, a merger then made it the world’s largest organization, to leave. Jobs were tough to come by those days with the kind of facilities and pays a true blue MNC offered. Still everyone left! To save costs further, replacements were done with existing junior resources. Sales stumbled, morale dropped; with as much fanfare, CEO was sacked and the country operations were sold to the competitor. We all, as ex employees by then, who had a bond and enjoyed a great corporate culture, made phone calls to each other and asked, ‘Why?’

This Why is now answered more in the rigid hierarchies, which were till recently, the reminisce of the 19th century. Old American ways of management, which were extended all over the world, started to crumble under the pressure of a myriad of things. You can call it disruption in the way we do business. It was triggered by a new wave of globalization which took root post the GATT agreement and GATS service levels. There were more global organisations all over the world from China, Spain, Brasil etc. There were leviathan mergers and hostile acquisitions happening all over the world. Of course the great leveler came in the form of information technology, where a new breed of managers came and started questioning their relevance in the organizations: from a mere computer hardware maintenance person to a person with core strategic input on how to optimize the organisations’ every process and practice.

Globe was generally a peaceful place to grow and global was everyone’s play. Speed became manifold. Growth projections were exponential. ERP was lost to management as a jargon and got naturally acquired by IT as a category, and IT majors started using Consulting to do the practice and on seeing the threat, consulting behemoths started offering IT consulting into their core offers. Strategy was the word on the streets. It still is!

Speed…Focus. And comes new work places where large was the name of the game. MDs and Chairmen where the buck stopped were too faraway from the ground, nonetheless they were all too powerful being the last word. Yet, the changes on the ground needed to be done by a careerist which most of the time an MD was not one. CEOs made their entry, took over the world by storm and became the superheroes of the 90s. CEOs were the C-suite magicians from fancy B-Schools. They were joined by a legion of XOs, aka CXOs — The COOs, CFOs, and lately CTOs. They just were everywhere. The ultimate dream of a careerist now had a name. Or many names. And it looked everything is in order and the eponymous Vice Presidents now had a sigh of relief.

Google. iPhone. Disrupt. Gone. Why?

The strategy became again the deadlock. There were so much change happening on the ground, where CXOs were stuck in the past of 3 year strategies. They were the heroes of a different time and place. The purpose of the organisations and their businesses were becoming redundant everyday. Test of relevance and test of efficacy were finally making sense in every boardroom around the world. No one knew where the next competitor could come from? And with the easy PE money, they scale so much like the meat eating bacteria. Before you know, everyone else in the world knew! Diversification, Core competency, Acquisition, you name it; nothing was helping! What was needed were CYOs: those who firmly keep a leg on the ground and the other in the boardroom. CYOs were the new messengers helping to ease the pressure on the why. Helping to answer and keep building the purpose, the why, in every organisation.

The CYOs could be as vague as a CIO to as clear as a CPO. Whatever is their responsibilities, their roles could never be further from the why of their organisations, the purpose, that will build the future of this clan. And of course their organisations.

It isn’t easy. With speed as the only constant in management decision making, hoarding or delaying information had been fatal. On the other hand, (amid ruthless c0ompetition and the technological advancement,) it is unavoidable for any organization to undergo a major change without making mistakes. Change has facilitated new ways of doing business that the traditional executives have not seen before. Some were usurped so fast in their feigned or real sleep. They all lost their why of existence and for the new warriors, the CYOs, should have this as their prime KRA. After all, they are the super specialized leaders on the ground with a deeper understanding on the changes that can threaten the why.

Where is Innovation?

Innovation is one of the key factors for the existence of CYOs. This is a far cry from the yesteryears when it was just an oral verbiage of all. With the unending possibilities that one can bring in and the associated challenges that a competition could bring in something better, innovation has become vital to any firm. This, of course led to creating the position of Chief Innovation Officer. But as one survey says, before hiring a CIO, the Board and the senior leadership must have a clear understanding on Innovation in order to maintain a healthy environment across the organization. A good CIO builds strong relationship with the heads of strategy, digital, customer insight, research and development, new product development and operations to focus on delivering differentiated value for customers by developing an innovation that the company can successfully make, distribute and support at scale. When you look deeply, this should not be just the job of the CIOs; rather this is what every CYO should be working on. Because when silos come in, innovation stops. And the barrage of onslaught will start. The whys will disappear. And there will be another organization that has a better purpose and strategies to solve what you were solving: They may have better CYOs.

Winning customers has become a tough game which needs in-depth knowledge in each sector. These add ons of new positions impacted positively for the organizations apart from the acceptance problem. Product, most times is a service, and we saw them CPOs making their grand entry. Today we see them hogging more limelight at most panels just because they know more of their present product and the future than anyone else; they live and breath the product. Their purpose and the organisation’s purpose well aligned.

Increased regulation, increased scrutiny, increased personal liability risk; All these ‘increases’ represent huge changes in the role of today’s Chief Compliance Officers. With core shifts like Fintech, there are accelerated ways of doing business unlike the traditional ways. Management thinks you have found the next wave for the organization, and you ensured that you are a winner if its goes to the market in the coming month. The tough part is you could step into the authorities and governments on the wrong foot as happened with VoIP platforms and Car Hailing App services. As much as a compliance officer is the need, the broader view of this as the purpose of the organization, the why, will help in avoiding this costly mistakes while doing a hasty turnaround or creating a forward path.

In the words of Rafel Gomes, an executive in Accenture Finance & Risk Services, “Compliance needs to ensure that the right controls are in place across these new digital media”. In the era of digitalization, the leaders should also be digital first. Undoubtedly, there occurs a demand for Chief Digital Officer, who will be the key factor in winning the customers or optimizing organizational processes. They are not just big idea people any more, but the specialists to make the ideas happen digitally, generating revenues for the organizations. They are the purpose officers, who leverages on the digital tools to answer the whys in a changing environment. The best parallel of their relevance is the CDOs of cities like New York City where the governance is the purpose and digital enablement adds to that why.

To sum it, on these change super highways in the times in which we live in, relevance is a continuous test. And strategies overlap objectives and missions. The question the organization should ask itself is, “Why?’ Test the last purpose: Is it still relevant in the changed, changing or will change market? Where purpose of an organisation is to be made Holistic: it is no more to be done in silos. Nor just in the boardrooms, where the CXOs might still be grappling with the unknown. Comes in the CYOs with hands on knowledge on change, products, innovations or risks. The growing role and interconnectedness of technology demand these specialized ‘Why’ teams are everywhere. CYOs will be the future of any and every of the organisations if they want to exist, let alone survive. The relevance of CYOs will extend with positions like Chief Risk Officer, Chief Web Officer, and Chief Customer Officer etc. The caveat should be, even their purpose to be tested continuously. And as far as the CXOs are concerned: shoot the messenger and you are shooting yourself.

Differentiating the business (sic!) by providing an experience to the customers only can help to withstand the fierce competition in the future economy. Lowering prices and barriers of entry has become impossible strategies, when every service and product design start resembling each other. We need warriors out there to lead the changes day-in-day-out, minute by minute. They bring in the why. And that’s the purpose and the rise of CYOs.

Epilogue: The global office of my ex company is tackling a new set of challenges. Rampant nationalization of upstream assets shifted the business models. Growing isolated oil fields created a wave of local economy imbalance, which led to terror bids and kidnapping. Sustainability issues, crashing prices, and new energy forms are all pushing the purpose and relevance. And there is a new breed of CYOs out there, creating and balancing and as per the last quarterly results. They are still the №1.

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Rajesh Johnny (RaJ)

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