When I met John Hofmeister, then-president of Shell Oil, about four years ago, I asked him what he actually did. He paused for a second and then responded, “I spend about 60 percent of the time looking outside the company. I have to see what is going on around us with other companies, the government, society and across the world.”
He went on to explain that he needed to keep the company focused on its goals. That’s what his staff did. He also needed to keep the strategic view always in mind with long term focus, the 60 percent of the time he looked outside. I understood that he saw strategic thinking as being critical to his job responsibilities.
I was reminded of that this week when Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com and the Hay Group released their annual list of Best Companies for Leadership.
The survey also asked what skills the companies valued the most. The top 20 companies valued strategic thinking (67.6 percent) above execution (47.6 percent), inspiring leadership (37 percent), decision making (31.5 percent, and even teamwork (31 percent).
The top 20 are:
1 GENERAL ELECTRIC
2 SOUTHWEST AIRLINES
3 3M COMPANY
4 PROCTER & GAMBLE
5 ACCENTURE
6 WAL-MART STORES
7 NESTLE
8 COCA-COLA
9 MCDONALD’S CORPORATION
10 INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES
11 IBM
12 CISCO
13 UNITED PARCEL SERVICE
14 IKEA
15 ABB
16 ZAPPOS
17 HEWLETT-PACKARD
18 GOLDMAN SACHS
19 UNILEVER
20 GENERAL MILLS, INC.
Strategic thinking is what keeps you moving forward. How fast and how far depends on your vision.
1 comment:
I totally agree with you Mr.Leadership. I am a firm believer in planning and strategizing to reach a goal. I'm currently working with different groups of people with different sets of needs, and different audiences that THEY reach out to. I find it hard to explain (to them) my point of view when all they get from me is a lot of questions. I guess my process is: Envision the result - create the steps to get the result - create a strategy. It's almost like working backwards, but I feel this helps so much because if you think this way, then you have an opportunity to come face to face with possible problems that might get in the way. All of this, of course, happening in my head before taking any course of action.
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