When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough get… INNOVATIVE.

During the economic recovery, adapting Joseph P. Kennedy’s inspiration is good guidance to American CEOs (and their PR counselors) for two reasons…

Going gets tough…

Turnover among American CEOs is up in 2010. According to a report by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CG&C), 441 CEOs departed January-April, 14 percent more than during the same period in 2009. 

Resignations and retirements were the most common reasons for departure.

CG&G’s John Challenger said he expects to see increased chief executive turnover in the coming months. “Companies are making the transition from recession to recovery, and with that usually comes a transition in leadership.” 

Good CEOs get innovative…

In tough and good times, the most innovative CEOs come up with their insights by spending more time practicing five specific skills than do their counterparts, according to a six-year study by several business scholars.

The skills surfaced during interviews with leaders such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Dell’s Michael Dell and were reported in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) January–February 2010 issue.  Editors at The Strategist, published by Public Relations Society of America, summarized HBR’s findings in the Winter 2010 issue in an article fittingly entitled “The Five Things Great CEOs Do”…

1-QUESTION: Challenge assumptions; ask “Why?”, “Why not” and “What if?” to spur creative thinking.

2-OBSERVE: Watch your customers experience your product/service, while focusing on what’s different from what you expected.

3-EXPERIMENT: Get training outside your expertise or examine a product/service just to see how it works.

4-NETWORK: “Contact the five most creative people you know and ask them to share what they do to stimulate creative thinking.” 

5-ASSOCIATE: Connect seemingly unrelated questions and ideas to bring all of the others together.

Posted: May 13, 2010 at 4:13 pm by Ron