Business | Technology
CEOs seek more ways to tackle change
IBM survey shows managers from emerging countries seek to learn from their counterparts in similar nations
- By Scott Shuey, Chief Business Reporter
- Published: 00:08 October 25, 2008
Dubai: International Business Machines (IBM) gathered about 150 of the region's leading chief information officers (CIOs) to a conference recently in Dubai to the talk about what the future holds for their companies.
The main focus of the conference was IBM's CEO (chief executive officer) Global Study, the result of interviews with 1,130 CEOs from 40 countries.
Peter Korsten, a partner and vice-president with the company who also heads the company's think-tank, said one of the report's significant findings was what he called the "change gap".
That gap measures the difference between the amount of change a CEO thinks his company needs and that company's ability to implement that change.
Two years ago, according to the report, eight per cent of companies were not able to handle the changes they needed. Today, Korsten said, that number has almost tripled, with 22 per cent of CEOs saying their companies are unable to handles needed changes.
"The most important trait of the enterprise of the future is not to be willing to accept change, or be able to manage change or be ready to cope with change, no, every single person has be hungry for change," he said. "Change must be in the DNA of an organisation. We warned that any organisation that is unwilling or unable to change will have a very tough time of it."
Korsten said CEOs are also looking at the growing influence of emerging markets. "What you're seeing is that the pace of the world is speeding up," he said. "We already knew that the emerging economies, as they are often called, will take a bigger chair and chunk of the world's growth, and that seems to be happening more quickly."
Korsten said that while the world is "growing a bit less fast than then we had hoped," he said the proportion and the impact of growth in the emerging economies is growing more quickly than anticipated.
He also said managers in emerging markets are looking more to other emerging economies for ways to manage their businesses.
"What we are learning is that CEO and CIOs in Brazil are more interested in learning from their peers in India, or here, or in China, then what CEOs and CIOs are doing in America and in Europe." He said CEOs in emerging markets are looking for other people who know who to handle high-growth environment and who know how to deal with the changing infrastructure, legal frameworks, and role of the government in those economies.
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