Connection

A CEO doesn’t just attend networking events, their entire life is one long networking event. Whether they are connecting with their staff, their customers, their suppliers or the world in general, they are consistently ‘on’. Opportunities are always out there and can be lost if you’re looking inwards. This doesn’t mean a CEO must be on a constant treadmill of ‘meeting and greeting’ – far from it, they’d never get anything done – but they’re always open to the possibility of connection.

Vision

A leader inspires and motivates others to take a journey. It’s not just about ambition within the confines of their own company or industry but also curiosity about and an understanding of how they fit into the wider world. Good CEOs will always surround themselves with an outstanding team. They will question everything they are told, dissect it down to the nub of the issue and see if they can rearrange what they have learned for the benefit of the company’s future.

Passion

If you don’t care, you don’t achieve. CEOs must be the beating heart of the company and, as such, no-one is more invested in making it succeed. It’s not enough to care, they must transmit their enthusiasm for the business to their management team, in the expectation that this cascades down throughout the workforce. On the other hand, passion for their cause often means CEOs tend to speak their mind, whether what they are saying is popular not.

Decisiveness

A good CEO will tell you that decisions should never be made in a vacuum and that they listen and take advice from talented colleagues every day. That said, the leader of the company is never going to be led by the nose. They’re always willing to make that final call and, when called upon, the really tough decisions.

The earliest practical computers were power-hungry behemoths, often housed off-site in a dedicated, secure, and environmentally-controlled facility. Terminals were almost literally “dumb” – monochrome boxes fixed to the desk, constrained by physical wiring and with functionality limited to what their remote engineers and programmers decided to permit.

This began to change with the advent of personal computers in the mid ‘80s, which shifted the processing and at least some of the choice of features to the consumers. Soon everyone had their own PC on a “one-per-desk” basis, along with their fixed line phone and perhaps their own printer too. Then mobile phones arrived on the scene and their rapid evolution into smartphones, tablets and phablets, coupled with the advent and subsequent explosive growth of the internet, enabled the current paradigms of mobile and “always on” computing.

This brings us up to the present. Some of the specific developments in technology which are likely to have an increasing influence on how our sector does business in the relatively near future have already been discussed in previous articles e.g. DNA mapping, mobile payments, and even robo-advisers. (Hopefully that sort of artificial intelligence will not be a precursor to a real-world Skynet!)

However, having briefly embraced a distributed desktop model, there is now a quite definite trend back towards centralised computing. The value of our data is increasingly being recognised and turned to commercial advantage, and this is easier to do when the information is all in one place. Old concepts are becoming prevalent again, albeit rebadged, for example data warehousing and CRM (Salesforce.com, anyone?) along with slightly newer phrases like “Big Data” and virtualisation. The real buzzword at present is “The Cloud”, a generic term for a range of external hosting, storage, and data presentation concepts. Underpinning its hype, though, in a familiar echo of the mainframes of the ‘70s, we find vast server farms located offshore and cooled by the sea, supporting the likes of Amazon and Google.

It has doubtless not escaped your notice that the Cloud is not without its risks. Ask Sony, or Ashley Madison, or any celebrity naïve enough to post naked selfies to an online account. The Internet and social media can be both a blessing and a curse, for customers as well as for businesses.

Although data is becoming increasingly centralised again, there is one genie that definitely won’t go back in to its bottle: mobile computing. To continue to be successful most, if not all, industries will need to put access to their data and control of the methods of interaction with it into the hands of their actual customers, who increasingly expect to drive the engagement on their own terms, wherever they may be, and at whatever time. Not so long ago, no-one had heard the phrase 24×7, but now it’s a business necessity.

Sadly, this applies to us as well as to our customers. I’m very much afraid that the Blackberry – or its wearable, holographic, heads-up display equivalent – is likely to be coming to bed and on holiday with us well into the foreseeable future. It will take a social revolution rather than a technological one to reverse that trend.