How to go from chief executive to chief envisioner

Let’s do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officer’s responsibility is to safeguard the organization’s finances, then what’s the responsibility of the chief executive officer ? Surely, it’s more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the “CEO” naming convention doesn’t give much insight as to what the role is or what it’s responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Who’s responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation state—it’s right there in its etymology. But, perhaps, the “CEO” nomenclature needs a bit more clarity. After over 200 in-depth CEO interviews at the Yale School of Management’s Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management since 2020, Jon Iwata has an interesting take on the matter. According to Iwata, the former IBM senior vice president and chief brand officer and now lecturer at Yale, the job of the CEO involves the challenge of “ refounding ” the company. That is, the founder started the organization for a reason, be it a year or a century ago, with a thesis about the business and why it exists beyond the category. Simon Sinek refers to this as a company’s “why;” I like to think of it as the company’s conviction. It’s what they believe and are willing to stand for, even if it means losing business. I find conviction to be much more action-oriented because your organization can have a “why” but veer away from it in the face of inconvenience. However, you can’t be convicted if you aren’t willing to stand for it. Through this lens of refounding , the CEO’s job is to maintain the integrity of the founder’s intended conviction and align it to a holistic operating system within the organization. That operating system, of course, is culture. Like any culture, the ideology of a company’s conviction informs the way the organization see’s the world and how it engages in it. Over time, as an organization grows and each incremental team member grows further and further away from the founder and their intentions. Consider a start-up with five employees. It’s likely that the sixth employee gets to spend a substantial amount of time with the founder and hear her preach the gospel of the organization’s conviction. The sixth-hundred employee, on the other hand, after the company’s 50 th year of operation, not so much. Therefore, there must be a vehicle to evangelize the enduring convictions of the organization. That’s the responsibility of the CEO. This isn’t merely a matter of proximity; it’s also a factor of context. Take the fictional start-up that grows into a multinational organization sixty years later. Over the course of those decades, the world around the organization changes substantially, which exerts force on how the organization behaves. Societal norms shift. Social expectations evolve. New technologies bloom. The result...

Preview: ~500 words