The best CEOs are excellent at growing and running a company within a known business model. What they don’t do well enough is reinvent and innovate. It’s not because they’re incompetent, they just fall short at the task.
Sure, there are exceptions who are both visionary CEOs and innovators — Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, for example — but there are very few companies that can stomach that sort of leadership.
So if the CEO isn’t someone who can innovate, then who should? It’s a question that I’ve discussed with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank and business thinkers such as Yves Pigneur, Henry Chesbrough, and Rita McGrath. We believe that CEOs need a partner for innovation inside their companies, someone who will create and defend processes, incentives, and metrics that encourage radical ideas and find new areas for growth. It’s an executive who can help large companies reinvent themselves while they’re still successful. And this new role needs to sit in the C-suite.
You could call this person the Chief Entrepreneur (CE) — someone who can lead the future of the company while the CEO takes cares of running the existing business. This is a huge divergence from the traditional norm for chief roles, but the CE is a necessary position of power to ensure that a company innovates.
But how do you hire for the role? Where do you look? What qualifications must the candidate have? I’ve written up a job description below to make the search easier for Fortune 50 companies:
Are you a Chief Entrepreneur?
Fortune 50 company seeks a Chief Entrepreneur who will build the future. The Chief Entrepreneur will be responsible for managing a portfolio of entrepreneurs who experiment with new business models and value propositions. The candidate is someone with a passion for taking calculated risks. This is not a CTO role or a role that reports to the CEO. The Chief Entrepreneur is an executive as powerful as the CEO, with clear leadership over radical innovation within the company.
Look at the list below and see if any of this connects with you:
Sound like you? OK, now let’s consider your day-to-day tasks.
What are your responsibilities?
Today’s corporate world needs more ambidextrous organizations: companies that execute and innovate at the same time. This setup will be hard to understand and realize because of the immense power that the CEO role has held for decades. But as Steve Blank points out, every large company must face the reality of continuous innovation and disruption or risk becoming obsolete.
There’s no doubt that the CE and CEO are going to experience conflict. But with a bit of patience and perseverance, this new role can be successfully integrated into an existing corporation. Potential CEs may already exist in many companies — we just don’t pay attention to their traits or give them the chance to lead innovation. This person might even be you.
By Alexander Osterwalder
Source: Harvard Business Review
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