Nice article in Wired this month.
According to Rajesh Chandy of the London Business School, research shows that the amount of time a CEO gives to thinking about the future is a pretty good indicator of how innovative and successful the company as a whole will be. And yet the same research found that the CEOs actually only spend 3% of their time on it.
Two more interesting things:
CEOs whose first jobs were in marketing or R & D were more likely to give time to think about future customers, competitors and technologies relative to those of today, whereas those which backgrounds in other disciplines less so. (And I probably don't need to remind you how few CEOs come from a marketing background.)
Bill Gates used to have 'think weeks' twice in year, holed up in a log cabin, thinking about the future of Microsoft. Didn't do him any harm, did it?
So the moral of the story is... if you head up a company, and particularly if you're from an operations, financial or technology background (let's say), be sure to schedule in more thinking time - it's important.
And if you're an employee of a business whose CEO doesn't put his or her mind to thinking about the future (and/or presumably encouraging senior managers to do so), Rajesh has one piece of advice: "bail early"!
