Cornerstone Blog

On the surface, if you need to recruit an executive in a hurry, you’ve done something wrong.

Poor performance?  That doesn’t appear overnight. As soon as your suspicions were confirmed, you should have been talking to a headhunter.  (Remember, the Retained Search firms work in strictest confidence when needed; it’s hard to keep a secret with contingency recruiters).

Bad fit with the team? That should have been apparent in the pre-hire investigation and evaluation. Someone dropped the ball.

But sometimes it just happens. if a senior leader suddenly buys a Honda Gold Wing, yearns for the open road and walks out of the door, there’s not much you can do.  You are left scrambling for top talent to fill a suddenly imminent void.

Where the rush-to-sign gets a bit out of hand is with day-to-day expectations. Sophisticated technology and particularly AI, is slashing the time once need to find and evaluate key leaders.  That, in turn, has turned into a competitive issue for recruiters. If headhunter “A” says he can give you a list of candidates in 21 days, headhunter “B” sets out to do so in 14 days.

In the Retained Search arena, the most comprehensive and complex (and successful) of them all, eight weeks was, for a long time, the industry norm for submitting a verified list of qualified candidates. Today, many firms promise fulfillment in 20 business days. Some promise a preliminary list in 10 days.

Does it matter? Is it that much better to recruit an executive in three weeks instead of six? Is the delivery timeline important enough to you to influence a decision which firm to retain?  Let’s take a look.

On the pro side. Efficiency is a valued attribute and speed is associated with efficiency. So, in general terms, filling a leadership void as quickly as possible is a good thing.  Also, other things being equal, the sooner you get your new exec contributing, the better off you are.

But that comes with a big “if”, as you will recall from your schoolday Shakespeare: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”.  Quick is only a plus if you get it right.  If it unravels in a trail of not-quite-what-we-thought-it-was, it suddenly jumps from the pro side to the con.

What technology is good at is finding people fast on a formulaic basis. But that is no longer the primary challenge.  As our president Larry Shoemaker is fond of saying:

“It used to take 80% of the time to find the candidate, now we find them in 20% of the time.  It takes the other 80% to verify the fit.”

And that’s why executive search should at least leave enough time to make a phone call.

The guiding consideration when you recruit an executive is the future of the company. In any business, the organization is only as good as the people running it.  Growth, profit and working environment come from people, not systems. So setting out to find the best person for the job in the shortest possible time can add to the inherent challenge of the task for marginal, if any, benefit.

As they say in the woodworking shop, “do it right, not over”

Dick Daniels is a highly experienced and qualified Cornerstone coach and the founder of the Leadership Development Group in Chicago. His latest blog post approaches an issue that some organizations still have trouble with – assessing the return on investment in developing leaders within the organization.

The name of Dick’s mission, Intentional Leadership Development,  underscores a frequent failing in organizational leadership strategy — once is not enough. An ad hoc strategy of engaging skilled coaching in response to a specific challenge or weakness is better than doing nothing. But after putting out that one fire, and perhaps returning a major talent back onto the track, the strategic benefit declines.

The alternative, superior strategy is what Daniels means by “intentional leadership development,” which is structured to move high-potential talent into a leadership development environment at multiple levels. Such an approach results in an organization of collaborative leaders throughout the structure, focused on operational efficiency and enhanced productivity.

Because the strategy is applied to key points in the organization’s business journey, an intentional leadership development program can be expected to lead to:

• Improving bottom-line financial performance
• Attracting and retaining your industry’s best talent
• Driving a performance culture
• Increasing organizational agility

“When you take an organizational view of executive coaching, it becomes an important investment in the growth of the company,” says Daniels. “You are building a foundation for greater effectiveness and efficiency.

“Numerous studies have reached the same conclusion. Organizations that invest continually in leadership development perform better than those that don’t.”

Read more about Dick Daniels’ philosophy of intentional leadership development.

Does your trust in business people go up once you know what they look like?

We’ve just refreshed our video library here at Cornerstone International Group. It’s been a while but will become a frequent occurrence.

Video in marketing is now ubiquitous. According to various studies:

• Over 75% of global internet traffic is video based
• 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool
• 50% of companies in North America and Europe will produce videos this year to support brand awareness.
• 96% of people prefer watching a video to learn more about a product or service

These statistics are heavily oriented towards consumer marketing, but they include the rapid use of video for all business communication purposes.

We’re in what’s called the B2B sector of commerce. As an executive recruiter and leadership developer, our customers are other businesses, so our focus is business-to-business.

The B2B sector, as a generalization, has been slower than B2C to adopt digital technology in communications. What we market is not usually brightly colored, visually attractive, makes music, or moves intriguingly.

Our business rationale is deliberative, complex and very customized. Not an argument that benefits from packaging sound and motion. Or so you would think.

We produced six marketing videos earlier this year. We took the occasion of our annual global conference to interview 22 members from offices in 20 countries around the world.   We had a lot of fun doing it and learned some unexpected things.

Here is Unexpected Learning #1.

Cornerstone International Group is among the global leaders in executive recruiting.  Our members likely speak over 30 languages, which is an interesting statistic made more interesting when you see and hear them discussing their work in their native tongue.  If you watch this video, you’ll see and hear members talking in Swedish, Portuguese, Flemish, Spanish and German as well as English — (don’t worry, there are sub-titles).

For the first time in our 30 years, we had finally put a face to some of the most skilled and experienced professionals in executive recruiting, demonstrating at the same time the truly global reach of our services.

In the process, we made use of one of the basic attractions of digital media, visual identity. A majority of participants in social media post their photo because people want to know what you look like. It bonds them just that tiny bit closer.

Same with business video if we go back to trust in business. Benefits are not restricted to product demos or leadership exhortations. Video puts a human face on the organization, as we just did. We’re very diverse, spread all over the planet, but we share common beliefs and represent to our customers a common cause. It’s possible that people in the marketplace might warm to those attributes more once they’ve met our team — even on video.

So, if you are researching search firms or leadership development, check us out on our global website or just hit play on the video up above. You will not only learn important little factoids about how we can be of help to you, you will also see we’re a pretty likeable bunch to partner up with.

Add a comment here after you’ve checked out the video.

Some data regarding executive recruiting failures doesn’t add up.

Executive search is an excruciatingly diligent process. This is not looking for a plumber on Angie’s List. Executives get paid a lot more, they have more responsibility, and there is a pronounced relationship between their competence and the company’s bottom line.

So an executive recruiter, such as Cornerstone International Group, has a lot riding on its work, its discovery, evaluation and recommendation.

Despite this, there is a failure rate in the business that gets scarier and scarier. A few years ago, Forbes established that many as 40% of new managerial hires were gone at 18 months. More recent studies have pushed that to 60%.

Those are staggering failure rates that contradict processes used in selection.  Which would imply, perhaps, that a dangerous generalization is being thrown around.  I have never seen an attempt to identify and associate the hiring process with the failure rate.

Contingency search, and conceivably some in-house search, are not by design as sophisticated as retained search. Judging by random performance reporting of our members, new executive hires in place at 18 months is likely to be at least 90%.

That said, there are definitely issues that a company needs to at least be aware of and is possibly able to manage when hiring a key player. And it is this.  An HBR article two years ago quoted a 10-year longitudinal study that found 61% of executives said they were not prepared for the strategic challenges they faced when given senior leadership roles.

In other words there are quite possibly many situations where, despite a broad competence and suitability, a new executive just does not have the depth of experience for specific hurdles.  It’s a situation that exceeds the limits of the recruiting safety net

The strong performance of Cornerstone International Group members can be attributed in part to our structure and outlook. We are a network of individually owned firms, most with long standing in a regional market, and we share best practices and principles. One is to get to know the client as thoroughly as the candidate to ensure fit.

That’s the first line of defence, but today’s specialist recruiter needs another. Increasingly, we are seeing the emergence of the hybrid recruiter-coach with the joint capability of finding the best person and then helping her or him to master the challenges of the specific role once in place.

We are in the early stages of this journey by doing things a little differently. Many of our members have highly qualified coaches backing up the recruiting offer. But we have also assembled a powerful global network – one of the largest – of highly qualified, certified independent coaches with the flexibility and range of services to meet any individual leadership challenge, either supporting a hire or stand-alone.

We will be tracking performance data relating to recruiting support and leadership capabilities growth. I look forward to sharing it here.

The international survey we recently released, “Where’s your business heading?,”  identified the three top strategy challenges for business leaders today.  The first two are heavily technology enabled – the accelerating pace of business and the challenge of vanishing boundaries.  The third is not native to the business environment but is rapidly becoming its most important issue.

Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, is a recent phenomenon, as in an extraordinary occurrence. It is only 50 or so years old and is already pronounced dead by contrarian thinkers, a sure sign that it is hugely influential. Known also in some circles as Responsible Business Conduct, it focuses on how business can pursue wealth creation in harmony with the environment and society.

It is no coincidence that CSR has become a major factor in recruitment as we transit younger, more educated and more self-aware generations of workers.  Today’s candidates are more socially selective throughout their job hunt.

They place heavy emphasis on an organization’s reputation and commitment to the community and want to ensure their future employer engages in CSR practices that align with their own beliefs.

CSR, in effect, is the Why of business.  If you are not familiar with the Why movement, Google Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why”, or a companion book “Find your Why”.  Here’s a quick introduction.

Sinek’s uses a simple model he calls the Golden Circle, shown above.

It describes how every organization operates on three levels.  Everyone knows WHAT they do.  Many of them know HOW they do it.  Very few know WHY they do it.  Sinek does not mean “making money” which he considers a result. He is looking for a cause, a belief, the reason why you get up in the morning.

Sinek believes that when a customer’s personal beliefs align with your values, he/she is not only more likely to do business with you but become a regular.  This is why he feels that, while everyone else is marketing from the outside of the circle in, exceptional people such as a Steve Jobs or a Martin Luther King worked from the inside circle out.

The challenge of the traditional elevator pitch is to explain, within 10 floors, what your company does, how it does it and how good it is. In the elevator pitch of today, the components become what, how and why you feel a purpose, a belief that what you do is worthwhile.

The person speaking wants you to know that what he or she does is a benefit to society, is respectful of the planet and sustainable. In other words, the true goal of Corporate Social Responsibility.

CSR, and finding the Why in what you do, are important new influences. It is not long ago that CEOs proclaimed their mission was to earn money for the shareholders; Milton Friedman believed that a business focused on CSR “revealed a suicidal impulse”.

But, without changing the profit-based model, over 13,500 companies have signed the UN Global Compact, a promise to uphold social responsibility in human rights, labour standards and environmental protection.

That’s a worthwhile “Why”.

Read what leaders say about Corporate Social Responsibility in our survey “Where’s Your Business Heading?”

Or you can go here to watch Simon Sinek give a TED talk on Finding the Why.

Leaders challenged by disappearing boundaries

We released a global report last month with the title “Where’s Your Business Heading?”  Our respondents were business leaders in 20 countries but they sounded like old-time cattle ranchers — they want to be where there are no fences.

George Bradt, writing in Forbes about the report, came up with “boundarylessness” to describe this trend in business.  It’s not in Webster’s or the OED, but since there is no noun to describe this state, so be it.

When we talk of “cross-border”, or “global”, we are thinking of physical boundaries defining countries and markets.  Here, the consolidating-world trend is well advanced.  The current international trade disputes have exposed the global interdependence of business, especially with incredibly complex fields such as supply chains for giant industries.

So, where business is heading in many instances, the report tells us, is to move the decision-making closer to the customer.

And this is not only a physical adjustment.  Fences are falling inside the organization as well.  Traditional hierarchies are being re-drawn and management layers reduced.  Heinz Wester, the business guru with Cornerstone Stockholm who managed the survey and structured the report, cites two prime examples.

“Workers are being divided into smaller, flexible units that can be moved where needed,” says Wester.  “And that enables some streamlining. A middle manager who might have had 500 reports and a responsibility of $500M a couple of years ago might still be responsible for the P&L but have only a handful of direct reports.”

This contributes to the second trend – a faster flow of information to the decision makers.   Market knowledge no longer goes through a series of management layers: it flows uninterrupted – and unfiltered – to the C-level and even to the Board.

INFORMATION FLOW

The downside – and there always is one – is risk.  Risks rise with speed and more open strategies. Streamlining management can be fraught.  Are workers better trained today than 30 years ago?  Maybe.  Are they more self-motivated? Probably.  Nonetheless, millennials aside (who have yet to confirm an impact on business operation), it is hard to see why today’s employee would feel any more obligated to the corporate welfare than his or her parents.

And the risk rises as the need for speed continues. Customers appreciate a speed improvement factor of 2 but now want one of 5.  As geographic boundaries fall, it still leaves terms, conditions, legal requirements, sustainability and a host of other elements of risk to be managed in less time.

If you want to know more about what keeps our business leaders awake at night, read the full report of “Where is Your Business Heading?”.  It makes good reading.

This month, we release a significant new study of business trends based on interviews by our Partners in 20 countries. In this series of posts, we look at the impact of the study findings on the bedrock of business growth, hiring and managing top talent. First up, Speed: the accelerated pace of business.

 

Our latest study – Where is Your Business Heading? – identifies three current impacts on global trends.  The first is the new, ever-faster pace of business – the demands it creates and the procedures it modifies.  Do these include executive recruiting? Do we need to find new talent faster?  And the answer, inevitably, is yes and no.

Let’s start with yes.

Technology has almost completely re-written the hiring process. No more classified ads for workers or prestigious half-pages for executives. The Internet is a gigantic job-board and time-to-hire has been slashed from weeks/months to days/hours.

For most people, that is. LinkedIn lists 600 million ready to work and says one is hired every 10 seconds. Specialist recruiting firms match candidates with algorithms and flood the hiring company with “best qualified” resumes.

But that just gets you to first base. Someone still has to read the resumes, select, reference check and interview, negotiate and hire. The time here has also been reduced – but not as much — by early steps in AI and machine-managed profiling.

Clients encourage and seek out speedy service under the early-worm strategy that fears someone else will get the best people if you don’t move fast.

All of which thinking has merit but remain subject to the most important criteria of them all. The value of the hire to the company.

Every new employee brings value in different ways. The relevant assessment in recruiting requires turning around the telescope and looking in the other end. Value to the company will range widely from the plant worker to the decision maker and the best way to see it is to look for the cost of loss.

 

Cost of failure can be huge

If a machinist falls short, a replacement is swift and straightforward.  If an executive doesn’t fit the culture, the cost can be huge ($500k+), the disruption major and the risk of lost intelligence extremely serious.

Which brings us back to the other answer above, which was “no”. Reducing the time-to-hire is the least of your objectives the higher up the recruiting echelon you go.

To understand why, you just need to examine the service offer of the Retained Executive Search firm.  The companies already mentioned, the pile-‘em-high resume senders, are called Contingency Search firms. They compete with each other and are rewarded only if one of their resumes is accepted.  The retained firm is contracted exclusively to find the best candidate. Period.  (Go here to download our e-Book “Retained or Contingency”)

Time-to-hire has been shortened in the retained biz (some firms promise finalists within a month, compared to 2-3 months not long ago) but the time taken, however long, is still dictated by the in-depth assessment and qualification process.

Here’s how Cornerstone International Group President Larry Shoemaker explains it.

Retained search firms not only look more intently at available candidates, they actually create them. Superior knowledge – of markets, sectors, cultures and companies — is one of the foundations of the retained service model.  And, most important of all, is knowing who has not offered their services but who might be persuaded to.

Known as “passives”, these are high quality men and women who are currently employed.  Skilled recruiters, however, know the type of company and the type of offer that might pry them loose.

This intense focus on finding exactly the right person for each opening shows that retained search firms are acutely sensitive regarding the cost to the company of a failed hire. It is probably THE most important reason for their being hired in the first place. Against this backdrop, the need for speed is attractive, but strictly secondary.

NEXT:  The impact of a shrinking world on executive recruiting.

The growing number of companies that specify diversity in executive recruiting are not doing so because it’s the “right thing to do”.  It may indeed be a social benefit, but a company’s mission must be performance based or it goes out of business.

And, since creating a culture of inclusion and a welcoming environment for diversity usually means altering long-standing, strategic plans, the evidence and result must prove greater value than the systems in place.

Put another way, businesses are unlikely to change until there is a foundational reason to do so.

Modern diversity research, (particularly when diversity is intentionally surrounded with an inclusive culture) shows that women in leadership positions positively impact bottom-line revenue, profitability and client perceptions while increasing a brand’s total value.

Businesses with inclusive, diverse cultures achieve three important competitive advantages more easily:

• Better decision making – diverse backgrounds, educations and experiences broaden perspectives and improve the group’s critical thinking
• Innovation – diverse thinking processes facts more carefully while developing and considering a broader array of opportunities
• Broader appeal – diversity more quickly reaches key customer markets, including minority and underserved buyers, to increase sales

Beginning in 2010, the world’s top management consulting and data analytics research organizations explored the “Business Case” for diversity across many industries and markets.  Their results contain many similarities and draw essentially the same conclusions.

The Gallup organization, working primarily in retail and hospitality service industries, linked diverse work environments to increased employee engagement.  They identified “employee engagement” as a critical factor for driving business metrics upward through improving productivity, quality, employee commitment, retention and profitability.  Gallup proved diversity grew sales revenue and net profit.

Scientific American’s research concluded that organizations with inclusive cultures enjoyed:

• Greater innovation
• Greater creativity
• Improved bottom line profits with higher job satisfaction, lowered employee turn-over rates, easier recruiting, and a higher reputation for “good places to work.”

The “Women in the Workplace – 2018” report by McKinsey & Company compares annual results since 2015 and reports higher returns on equity, higher operating profit and higher stock prices year-over-year after organizations adopted and actively supported inclusive/diverse cultures.

Outside specific business and organizational culture research, demographic and economic shifts across the US population are propelling major changes in traditional business practices.

• Women represent slightly over one-half of the workforce population (50.8%). They are a growing percentage of all business’ customers, clients and partners.
• Women influence 85+% of all retail purchasing decisions
• Women impact the B2B market by representing 43% of Purchasing Managers
• Women create Women Owned Businesses

Companies with most women execs earned 34% higher returns

Mind Your Culture found that companies employing the highest percentage of women in executive positions earned a 34% higher return to shareholders than did companies who had few to no women in the same roles.  Companies with the most women in Director-level roles performed better than those with the fewest women and achieved 16% higher return on sales plus at least a 26% higher return on invested capital.

The data is sufficiently positive to encourage recruiters to take action.   Three years ago, Cornerstone’s Alejandra Aranda persuaded all eight of her competitors in Chile to sign a Code of Good Practice on Gender Diversity for the World Economic Forum.

Western markets tend to be where the diversity action is taking place.  According to the MCSI World Index, the majority of companies with at least 3 female directors are in developed markets.  In the US market, these companies achieved median returns on equity that were 11% higher and earnings per share of 45% more than companies with no women.

Elsewhere, a steep path gets steeper.   Globally, over one-fifth of the 2,694 MCSI Index companies still had all male boards in 2018.  MCSI (Morgan Stanley Capital International) projects it will be 2029 before a 30% female representation is attained among corporate directors universally.

These and similar reports also warn of increasingly slow rates of progress in business culture transitions – moving from aggressive, competitive and power-driven organizations to the more “constructive behaviors” type where high potential employees say they are more likely to choose to work and want to stay.

Embedded in many diverse business culture studies is a challenging, pre-existing condition – the elephant in the room.  This is the lack of qualified and accomplished women currently visible in top leadership posts, critical to building successful, inclusive cultures and greater businesses.

Successful, diverse business cultures must be inclusive at the highest levels of strategy and decision-making. 

A newly released global CXO Survey report by the Cornerstone International Group indicates that a developed sense of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is of growing importance in the transformation of a business culture.  The new generation of talent is only willing to work where their social expectations are being met

This no doubt helps to account for a situation where gender diversity on Boards and in the “C-Suite” achieves the highest reported levels of business financial success, yet it is also among the slowest improving rates appearing in published results measurement.

How do you decide if such change right for your business? To know if, when or how a business should become more culturally inclusive, the top leadership team must carefully review present performance inside their unique organization and consider their resources, both financial and human.  They must evaluate the challenges and potential rewards, sometimes against other, possible easier and less dramatic paths of change.

Finally, when it comes to recruiting candidates who will contribute diversity and welcome inclusiveness, you must first have built the appropriate environment.  Failing this, you run the risk of winning the enthusiasm of brilliant, talented candidates only to see them cross the street when your culture falls short.

Creating the results we are referencing here demands that everyone on the executive team understands, believes and become passionate about cultural inclusion.   They must embrace synergy between leadership, customers and employees and take responsibility to become accountable for implementations at every level.

Julio Portalatin, a Board Member with DXC Technology, is on record as saying:

“Make it a priority because it helps the business, not because it’s morally the right thing to do. Have a clear sense of the business case for diverse ideas, thoughts, and opinions brought about by different representation. Hire recruiters who have a track record of attracting very qualified and competent directors, who are also diverse in many ways.” 

Members of Cornerstone International Group include recognized leaders in the development of the diverse and inclusive workplace.  If you want to know more about the rewards and pitfalls of pursuing diversity in executive recruiting, get in touch.  That’s what we’re here for.

The most effective CEOs concentrate their efforts on leading with vision and values to inspire and enable others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. They focus 20-30% of their time up, 20-30% out, and less than 50% down. They can do this because they delegate managing.

Up

By definition, chief executive officers are the “chief” or most senior executives in organizations, reporting to the owners or boards of directors. Thus, they are critical links between organizations and boards, shadow boards, and owners.

Any time they spend building one-on-one relationships with those key stakeholders is time well spent. That time and those relationships help board members do even better jobs in their advisory and governance capacities, enabling everything in the organization to function better.

Out

Almost all CEOs need to get out more. Getting out and spending time with customers, collaborators, competitors and those influencing their organizations’ conditions gives CEOs the perspective they need to ask “What if” and challenge their own best current thinking in order for their organizations to continue to evolve. CEO Connection’s CEO of the Year, Susan Salka told me in 2011, how important it was to “be out in the field listening, listening, listening.”

This is not a substitute for having others challenging that thinking as well. The most effective teams include disrupters, rebels, challengers, deviants, and the like who serve as the loyal opposition, keeping the leadership team from falling into a group-think trap.

Down

As I’ve written before; Leaders influence; Managers direct. While it may not be that black and white, leaders generally do focus on what matters and why as managers focus on how. Both use different forms of influence and direction at different times. But leaders have a bias to influencing by inspiring and enabling through advice and counsel and co-creation, while managers have a bias to command and control, organizing, coordinating and telling.

The most effective CEOs lead strategic, organizational and operational processes. The only way they can keep this effort from eating all their time is to have others manage those processes. Instead, they focus on inspiring and enabling: inspiring by leveraging purpose, frameworks and incentives to drive vision and values and enabling by linking and integrating efforts.

Inspiring

If you seek compliance, indirect communication to produce awareness is enough. If you seek contribution, you’ll need direct communication so people can ask questions to build understanding. And if you want commitment, you’ll need emotional communication so people believe in the cause. Scaling that means focusing on purpose, frameworks and incentives.

People generally don’t commit to leaders, organizations or even teams. They commit to causes. When a cause-focused purpose is genuinely shared, all understand why they must do what they are setting out to do. Net, CEOs should drive purpose and why people should care to scale emotional commitment.

Frameworks are the basic conceptual structures that people use to flesh out their ideas. They help people know where to start, and they focus and guide thinking about how to achieve purpose. CEOs should leverage frameworks as swim lanes for others’ thinking.

Incentives are the consequences of behaviors. If the incentives are clear up front, they serve as antecedents, prompting the behavior. Even if they are not clear, people figure them out eventually. CEOs should leverage incentives to keep people focused on the most important whats on the way.

Enabling

Enabling is about linking and integrating efforts across the organization. The requires real delegation. Effective leaders focus their own efforts first on things they have to do well themselves and secondly on things they have to do themselves, but not necessarily well. Then they delegate and have others manage important things, delegate and do not manage less important things, delaying or cancelling the rest.

The key is finding others to manage the delegated but important things so they can devote more time to leading up and out while digging deep into their own organization from time to time to get a read on current and future talent and capabilities.

Need help finding the right CEO with the right Up/Down/Out orientation?
Talk to use about our Retained Executive Search Services that can find you an effective CEO

ATLANTA GA, June 21, 2019:  The evolution of organizational culture today is being driven by speed, boundarylessness and social awareness says a new study by Cornerstone International Group, a global executive recruiter.

Writing on Forbes.com today, George Bradt, an authority on executive onboarding and transition acceleration, identifies digitalization, technology and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as primary influences identified in the survey.

“The report confirms that speed and ubiquity of digitalization are rewriting information flows and technology has erased boundaries,” says Bradt. “Perhaps most significant is the growing impact of CSR.  The new generation of talent will only work where their social expectations are being met.”

The in-depth survey of CXOs was conducted in 20 countries by members of Cornerstone International Group, led by Heinz Wester of Cornerstone Stockholm. The Group is a global leader in retained search and leadership development with headquarters in Shanghai and here in Atlanta.

“Our structure allowed us to conduct one-on-one interviews with business leaders in different regions,” says Wester.  “As a result, we were fortunate to obtain really meaningful insights into the very fast- moving evolution of culture and leadership challenges.”

Issues identified by respondents included:

• Decision-making is being moved closer to the customer
• Information is reaching executive levels faster and unfiltered
• Social responsibility must start with the Board and permeate the entire organization
• Work groups are becoming more autonomous
• Niche talent acquisition is being favored because it delivers necessary knowledge on Day 1

Visit the global website of Cornerstone International Group to read or download the report “Where is Your Business Heading”.