Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In Part I of this three-part Advisor series on change management, we lay out the challenges associated with change in digital transformations and explore an innovative CMO solution to those challenges that leverages data analytics and GenAI.

In this Advisor, bestselling author Philippa White stresses that business is at an inflection point: the power is shifting into the hands of customers and employees, and there is a competitive urgency to create spaces and cultures where people want to work. The leaders who can do this will win; these leaders put human values like kindness, empathy, vulnerability, imagination, creativity, and courage first.

People understand what character is and why it matters but not what it takes to cultivate the habits associated with character. Without this understanding, efforts to elevate character to achieve competitive advantage at either the individual or organizational level will be compromised. As this Advisor explores, character must be embedded and institutionalized across the organization to reach its full strategic impact.

This Advisor presents results from a recent study that investigates how humility and narcissism affect CEO behavior. With a sample of 190 CEOs and data collected from interviews and public sources, the author introduces a set of diverse CEO archetypes by measuring humility, narcissism, and entrepreneurial status.

Ananthi Al Ramiah, Gretchen Reydams-Schils, and Matthew Phillips focus on the crisis of purpose within professions. Premised on purpose to begin with, many professions are struggling with inner distress and outer distrust. Instead of taking purpose for granted, the authors invite professionals to work on it by employing four Stoic virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance). Quoting philosopher Christopher Gill, who describes virtue as “expertise in leading a happy life,” the authors encourage purpose-driven professionals to reimagine themselves at the center of circles opening up to progressively widening communities, so they can ask how to take setbacks seriously, defy indifference, and reify the joy of tackling what matters most.

Andriy Rozhdestvensky, Sofiya Opatska, and Gerard Seijts (coauthor of Character: What Contemporary Leaders Can Teach Us About Building a More Just, Prosperous, and Sustainable Future) move us to extraordinary purpose, counting up to the 1,000 days of Ukraine’s resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. “How can societal leaders come to terms with the damage inflicted on them and then make the substantive shift of returning to a peacetime leadership approach equipped to rebuild and regenerate the country?” the authors ask. The article features hard-won insights from five resilient Ukrainian leaders (from parliament, the armed forces, church, business, the not-for-profit sector, and academia) who open up about their journey to, and undeniable power of, existential purpose.

Christian Busch, author of The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, and Nele Terveen explain how purpose helps leaders connect the dots between grand challenges and strategic responses. When leaders expect the unexpected, the authors explain, they incent their stakeholders to embrace uncertainty so they can better guide their organizations through adversity and disruption. By leveraging the five practices of Serendipitous Impact (impact mission, impact leadership, impact governance, impact networks, and impact measurement) unexpected events can help leaders come up with solutions that often cannot be seen, let alone fully defined, in advance.

Frank Jan de Graaf invites us to try on deliberative practices. Firmly rooted in pragmatism, deliberation has historically played a significant (some say central) role in democratic societies. It also comes in handy when opposite perspectives invite us to summon new ways to converse about issues that matter — but matter differently to each of us. Rather than bracing against those who don’t share a particular purpose, de Graaf advocates for open dialogue, so we begin to look beyond the current divides and discover integrative ways to develop new rules of engagement, frame new responsibilities, and discover new solutions.