10 Questions You Should Ask Your CEO

This is a bit bold and provocative, but I would argue that there are a small number of people in large organizations, who know the key questions to ask with regards to the future of their company and industry better than their CEO and other executives.

These people are the ones that understand the impact of exponential growth, digitalization, disruption and new approaches to innovation and how these forces will change entire industries and thus companies. I call them transformers.

They are still fairly hard to find, but they are starting to pop up more often and I also believe that companies that do a good job in understanding their situation (disruptive changes which brings out so many challenges and opportunities) can start identifying and developing these people and put them in the right places in their organization.

Hopefully, this list of questions can serve as a source of inspiration for an important triangle of people who set out for the task of finding and using these people. This triangle is based on 1) executives, 2) strategy, transformation and innovation leaders, and 3) HR people.

Hopefully, you as an individual concerned about your future and career can also find some inspiration here…

So here we go with the questions. Please note that they are in random order. I am still working on a framework and when this fall into place, I hope I can better prioritize the questions.

What business are we in? No, sorry, that is not fully correct because this is a fairly common question to ask. The question that the visionary people ask today is: What businesses are we — and our partners in our current and future ecosystems — in?There is a big difference here.

Do we have a digital strategy? Sorry, my mistake again, because that is already an outdated question for leading organizations. They have moved ahead of their competition and they ask this question instead: How do we keep developing our strategy in a world that is already digital and will become even more digital in the future? You only need one strategy as you can’t separate the analog/traditional and the digital/new world of business any longer.

What are the key elements for experimentation in the context of our organization?If you don’t know how to experiment your way forward — and if you don’t keep pushing how you experiment — you are losing. Have in mind that experimentation has to go beyond the things related to your products and services. You also have to experiment on business processes and organizational structures.

How can we instill a better sense of urgency? A big challenge in companies around the world is the lack of the sense of urgency. There is too much complacency even though many leaders, managers and employees sense that something is not right. Why? So few people are able to point out what is not right and get people onboard for change. Since there is no burning platform, few people see a need to for their organization to prepare for the unforeseen and unknown. This is a luxury companies can no longer afford.

We don’t really need to hire people every time we need to get a job done or when we need new capabilities. The question is: How can we develop an organizational structure that allows us to bring onboard the proper resources and capabilities when we need them — and to get rid of them when we no longer need them? This is definitely possible in this era of open innovation, crowd/outsourcing and free agents.

Do we have the right people on our bus? Jim Collins once wrote that great leaders start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats before you even set the direction. The challenge is to know which people to get onboard when we don’t even know the direction. But then again, this already says a lot about the people you need to get onboard. And remember that you don’t have to hire everyone; you just need access to the right capabilities at the right time.

Do I have what it takes to move my organization forward and help it transform in these challenging times? Think of mindset as well as capabilities and tools to do the right things. You need to know where you stand. If not, you can’t develop. Be honest here.

Do I have a process to stay sharp on the above? We can never stop learning again. The trick is to treat your career as a never-ending experiment with uncertain objectives and goals. Yes, you can of course set objectives and goals, but have in mind how fast everything will change in the future.

Information overload. It will only get worse. One of the biggest challenges with corporate transformation and innovation in general is that we have so much information available. This makes it difficult to know where to start and where to focus your efforts. The response should center around better education on the topics of corporate transformation and innovation and better processes for dealing with the vast loads of information. How do we find the information that really matters for what we trying to do? That is an important question.

The last question is simple. What are our values and our reasons for being relevant for our current and future customers? Simple yes, but also so difficult for many to answer and in particular if you are hard pressed on delivering quarterly results.

Let me know what you think and if you can suggest similar questions that executives should be asked in these interesting times.

And if you like this, you should check out my upcoming framework for corporate transformation: How Companies Must Transform — or Die!