Why Your CEO Will Be Fired By 2020 (or sooner)
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Over the past 50 years or more every business book written and every class, seminar or workshop offered was built on the framework of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) being the person in charge. The concept of a CEO emerge in the 1950s but is rapidly becoming obsolete and ineffective in the Digital Age and beyond.
CEOs will become Chief Leadership Officers (CLOs) or they’ll perish. The old school thinking and ways of CEOs are increasingly wrong for people; and they’re bad for business. This raises important questions:
- Would I trust driving or riding in a car with rusted chassis? Let alone one that proposes traveling at increasing rates speeds?
- Is there more to a business than financial profit?
- How is working for a CEO different from working with a CLO?
CEO-to-CLO
In the future, expect your CEO to grow into or be replaced by a person known as a Chief Leadership Officer™ (CLO). This top leader in your organization will have two primary responsibilities:
- Position the organization to be a leader in its chosen field;
- Position the people within the company (and beyond) to be leaders of their lives and work
All the business functions you’re accustomed to seeing, such as finance, marketing, operations, etc., will still be needed. CLOs, however, have a more holistic orientation as to the roles and responsibilities of leading the enterprise. Whereas CEOs focus on management and administration of the business for shareholder gain, CLOs focus on leading and navigating the company to be a profit-maker true to its purpose.
People in this present Digital Age (and the coming Age of Purpose) deserve and expect meaningful work, fair compensation, positive working conditions, and respect for their person. CLOs understand that cultivating these measures begins with a clear articulation of organizational purpose and the sincere desire to be positive difference making or contributors to societal improvement, i.e. profit-making in the fullest meaning of the word.
Entrepreneurial Millennial?
Take note! Avoid buying into the Industrial Age mentality and ways persisting in the Digital Age. Craft your new company and model your leadership style as a CLO. Measure all you’ve learned about business and leadership against the two responsibilities of a CLO (above). These two simple directives will keep your business decision making and sleep pattern more sound and profitable.
Purpose > Profits
Profits rule for CEOs. Try as they might, CEOs manage by objectives or results typically measured by financial profit, the narrowest definition of the word.
Financial profit is an effect. Logic tells us that in a cause and effect relationship, we work on the cause to produce the intended effect, profit in the case of a CEO. Focusing on and making decision based primarily on profit, logically places the cart before the proverbial horse. Sorry, the cart just doesn’t move as well with that set-up.
A CLO serves the business by simultaneously advancing the purpose of the organization and that of the people. This is known as The On-Purpose® Principle. The people in the business know its purpose and use it to make decisions and take actions aligned to the purpose of the organization. Purpose is the essential element for leading one’s life, and therefore, one’s business life and business as well. Purpose by its very nature is the inspiration of our passion that informs our aspirations so we’ll engage in the needed perspiration.
The Age of Purpose is upon us. Chief Leadership Officers will emerge as the title of the top officer in organizations. They will embody all that is good, noble, creative, serving and honorable within the world of business. And they will position everyone else to be a CLO within their scope of responsibility and authority.
What about you? Are you ready to be a Chief Leadership Officer?
