Innovation Impacts on C-Suite leaders roles, responsibilities, and careers

I’ve noticed “interesting to me” trends regarding how the C-Suite roles, responsibilities, and careers are changing — impacted by rampant innovation, technology, and the acceleration of progress. Below, I document what I believe to be the future and past roles of the CEO, CFO, CMO, CIO, CTO, CSO’s, CISO, COO, etc

Career shifts are caused by forces which have historically been absent, or “in-play” as a singular force seem to be combining for a strong head wind. [For another post, in short: Cheap American dollars, Crowd Involvement, Cheap & Accessible Software/Infrastructure methods, Software as exponential Operating Leverage, De-centralization of industry].

That was a mouthful. So that I don’t lose readers by delving into the theoretical, here’s how the C-Suite is being currently stressed, stretched, expanded into new roles. I see a few roles gaining influence, others losing influence or changing roles….. let’s jump right in.

CEO
Past/Present: The Fortune 1000, and especially the Fortune 500 leader of the near future is much different than recent past. Historically, a CEO came from either pure management, prior CFO, prior COO, or sales [depending on the vertical]. This explains why companies within the same vertical can have different results, focuses, and trajectories. Here — traditional finance, management, and MBA style skills were adequate. One could act on their historical distribution, customers, price points, mid-term strategy with slow execution, and industry growth.

Future: I believe fewer CEO’s will come from the ranks of CFO, COO — and begin to come from the Product Officer ,Marketing Officer or conversely a strategic COO. The future leader must be far more comfortable with changing industries, verticals, competitors, distribution methods, and interaction with the customer. Traditionalists can still have an edge, but only if they can pair rapid execution with Long/Mid/Short term strategy.

CFO
Past/Present: Current projections, Future Projects, green-lighting projects, Sarbanes, M&A, IPOs, attestation. These were the domain of the CFO. They wield signifcant power, usually only answering to the CEO. The worried about quarterly and yearly results — and often were seen muttering about why the accounting systems are so complex.

Future: I believe the CFO of the future is in trouble for mid-size firms, and will change significantly for large firms. With powerful data analysis tools, big data, and systems — traditional accounting functions are some of the easiest to automate. The financial function will become “real time”, and mountains of software, SaaS, and systems will be integrated to perform real time inventory, projections, analysis, and current state — leaving less staff to manage in finance. As a reference, The Big 4 accounting firms first moved large swaths of accounting functions to India — and are now in process of trial running replacing them with powerful software, currently focused on “point solution” — but as a system whole will provide significant value.

CMO
Past/Present: CMO historically had a moderate power base, on par with other peers — yet could lose out to the CFO / CIO on particular issues. They typically understood the customer base, and could grok the operational side of the house in specific verticals (less in operationally heavy industries). CMO’s often directed prodcut.

Future: It is very clear that the CMO is gaining in influence. CMO’s are expected to have higher budgets in the future than the CIO, and CMO’s will begin directing what were traditionally technology projects. However, now the projects will be more closely tied to the business — and less about raw operations. This will continue to cause friction with the technology organization — as engineers have historically made “technology decisions”. CMO may lose control over major product decisions to the CPO (product officer).

With SaaS software becoming the norm, budgets for internal staff may be less for those using SaaS. For CFO’s creating SaaS, more debt/financing may be needed than under enterprise models. SaaS software has historically high costs of creating as Enterprise software, yet instead of 6 or 7-figure sums for software, a buyer may only pay 4–5 figures.

CIO
Past/Present: Depending on the vertical, the CIO along with the CTO (below) could be mostly internally focused. They would manage large in house staff, deliver against set multi-year organizational projects, have fluctuating budgets (depending on vertical), and deal with many technology operational issues. The CIO often could be the engineer with some business sense, or great at delivering projects. If the CIO reported the the CFO, the company often used technology operationally — rather than strategically.

Future: CIO’s are going to be seriously challenged. Despite the explosion of technology, I expect CIO specific budgets to drop over time — and be re-allocated to CMO’s and Vendors. CMO’s will begin taking charge of technology projects, SaaS & Cloud Vendors will provide historical technology services. CIO’s will have smaller staff, with operational tasks being performed by the “crowd” (eg: taskrabbit of enterprise) and all-star staff will be in house. CIO’s will face issues as they will be directly charged with focusing on innovation — which requires a personality trait that is often contrary to the engineer-promoted-to-leader role.

CIO’s migrating from an Enterprise to SaaS company will have learning curves in creating Saas, Multi-Tenant, and real time software…… which is quite different than today’s Enterprise.

CTO
Past/Present: The CTO is often the smart, wild eyed technologist who pays attention to the future, and managed small R&D teams to P.O.C. new technologies for future projects. CTO’s were often not politically savvy, and were often at the whim of a CFO, or CIO for budget — if the role existed at all. The CTO could simply be a principal technologist whom the organization didn’t want to lose.

Future: The CTO will gain in importance, as technology-as-operating-leverage continues to expand. Once organizations find that CIO’s are typically not well suited for rapid innovation — the CTO will rise in power and will have a good relationship with the Product and Marketing team. CTO’s will be in charge of rapidly responding to altering business models, rapid competitor rising, product differentiation, and pricing pressure.

CSO (Strategy Officer)
Past/Present: If one existed, they focused on long term strategy to the organization. The best ones had a great view of the business environment, future trends, underlying fundamentals, and current product base. They were often the “architect/thinker” who could act at a slower pace.

Future: The world of strategy has changed dramatically. “Thick Strategy” has given way to “Fast Strategy”. It is no longer ok to create a multi-year strategy map and execute against it. Roadmaps, competitors, verticals, pricepoints, and adjacent competitors are nipping at the heels — and require significant agility, with fast execution. The CSO will often interact with the CTO of the future for faster delivery.

COO
Past/Present: They keep the business running. They deal with a never ending stream of future/past activities and business decisions to keep in play to keep the ship moving forward. With stresses often coming through other leaders dumping projects on them, they had a lot going on

Future: I believe the COO of the future will have better, more integrated systems, reporting, monitoring, and real time analytics. Devices and people will report their status automatically — while software helps to make better/faster tactical decisions. The COO will have a boon from interconnected systems, yet deal with a switching labor force who might not all be in house, or even employees. De-centralization will be the name of the systems and workforce.

CISO
Past/Present: CISO’s are already having trouble, on average. A recent report stated that an average CISO stays on the job for ~ 3 years. It’s clear why…. typically the CISO can be either a security engineer or infrastructure engineer with an MBA, or with some management prowess. However, the personality type often leads itself to be Operationally/Execution focused, with detail orientation. The future will be different.

Future: CISO has gained significant influence in the past few years. Previously, a CISO might come from other walks of security rather than Threat Vulnerability Management (TVM). They might come from Identity Management, Security Architecture, Operations, etc. Often a TVM personality had little interest in management, more so than the typical “engineer”. However, with significant hacking events to Sony, etc — companies are realizing that security is no longer an operational cost, but risk avoidance and IP protection. The CISO will be more of the “smart hacker” type with business skills, and may gain a board seat in high risk industries — rather than being the CIO’s direct report. The CISO will need to be much more agile, and forward thinking.

CSO (Sales Officer)
Past/Present: The Sales Officer was used to creating a great, multi-year strategy — but often at a high risk to being fired for being unable to meet often overly-zealous projections. The projections often came from the CFO or the always-optimistic CSO. Verticals, approaches to market, and products didn’t change that often. Customers and their needs were often understood — or forced to fit a mold. Hard charging sales techniques could be the approach, especially for high priced deals.

Future: The world is changing. Verticals, customer needs, price points, and SaaS are shaking up the world. Price points can be low for SaaS, so a sales team might be lower unless the organization has significant funding/debt to support a sales team. Products can be implemented quickly, and verticals change much faster than before. Customers no longer respond well to the high-pressure sales, instead opting for transactions that are asynchronous, and require less interaction.

Well, that’s it — if you want to give feedback or share thoughts — see me on Twitter at @czbond.