Beyond the millennium: CEOs size up the future - part one

Chief Executive, The, Jan-Feb, 1995

What are the major challenges facing business leaders beyond the millennium? For its 100th issue, Chief Executive asked a number of leading CEOs from different industries around the world to look over the horizon of today's headlines and tell us about their greatest long-term tasks ahead.

The best thing about the future, Dean Acheson once said, is that it comes only one day at a time. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. The future is crashing into the present with frightening speed. All the more reason for today's business leaders to be rooted in the future. "They aren't afraid to go against today's current business," GE's Jack Welch is fond of saying, "because they know their constituency is tomorrow." In this spirit, we asked several leading chief executives to identify and reflect on the pressing tasks ahead for tomorrow's CEO. Because of the overwhelming response, space limitations compel us to present this feature in two parts - the second of which will appear in CE's March issue.

ANDREW S. GROVE, INTEL: $5.8 billion manufacturer of computer microprocessors and operating system software. The main difference between the work of tomorrow's CEO and the work we all do today is that tomorrow we will be supplying, and competing in, a truly worldwide market. Every person, anywhere, could be a customer - or a competitor.

Pervasive digital technologies enable documents, images, and transactions to whip around the globe in seconds. That means teams of people thousands of miles apart can work together - or compete against each other. Simply put, today's prime cliche, globalization, will be hard reality tomorrow.

LESTER M. ALBERTHAL JR., EDS: $8.6 billion information-technology services company. The pre-eminent challenge business leaders face today is how to anticipate the challenges of tomorrow - for their customers as well as for themselves - and to develop strategies not only to meet those challenges, but to take full advantage of them.

Certainly, how best to leverage the unprecedented flow of information and creatively use it to improve both business performance and quality of life will be one critical challenge, as will harnessing cultural diversity and turning it into a differentiating advantage in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. So will seeing new synergies and seizing new markets before they become apparent. In addition, CEOs will have to transform themselves and their companies before they are forced to do so by external forces such as changing customer focus, shifting markets, and more aggressive competitors.

It is no longer sufficient simply to avoid complacency. In tomorrow's world, the challenge to initiate positive change will be even greater. To improve quality, enhance customer service, and create new business, change must be perpetual.

The companies that prevail over the coming years will be run by the leaders who best understand an emerging axiom of modern business: Those able to provide the best answers for their customers invariably are the ones that ask the most challenging questions - and demand the most - of themselves.

ALEX KRAUER, CIBA-GEIGY: $15.1 billion manufacturer of products for health care, agriculture, and industry. To successfully steer an organization of tomorrow, the CEO must meet the following challenges.

* Combine clear, visionary, strategic thinking with a sense of reality and an orientation in achieving results.

* Nurture a corporate culture that is willing and able to adapt to change.

* Incorporate the notion of sustainable development into day-to-day business.

* Understand that in today's complex world, few matters are necessarily good or bad, black or white. Most have merits, and it is balancing these - or living with the diversity and ambiguity - that presents the greatest challenge.

FRANCES HESSELBEIN, PETER F. DRUCKER FOUNDATION FOR NON-PROFIT MANAGEMENT: an organization that aids the social sector in achieving excellence in performance and building responsible citizenship. The three major challenges CEOs will face have little to do with managing the enterprise's tangible assets and everything to do with monitoring the quality of: leadership, the work force, and relationships.

The first challenge requires understanding that leadership is a matter of how to be - not how to do it. Communicating vision, unleashing the power of dispersed leadership, and embodying the organization's values will be basic and indispensable in a tenuous future.

The second challenge is building a competitive work force for the future, which requires banning a hierarchy that limits and constricts, skillfully leading a diverse work force, and building a productive workplace where tams and individuals can maintain high performance.

The third challenge blurs all boundaries: forming partnerships that will restore the cohesive community. This transcends the corporation and, if unmet, will diminish it. Government alone cannot meet burgeoning social needs, and the corporation cannot take on responsibilities the government is relinquishing. The social sector alone does not have the resources to meet the needs of children, families, and communities.