How to go from chief executive to chief envisioner
Let’s do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officer’s responsibility is to safeguard the organization’s finances, then what’s the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, it’s more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the “CEO” naming convention doesn’t give much insight as to what the role is or what it’s responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Who’s responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation state—it’s right there in its etymology. But, perhaps, the “CEO” nomenclature needs a bit more clarity. After over 200 in-depth CEO interviews at the Yale School of Management’s Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management since 2020, Jon Iwata has an interesting take on the matter.
According to Iwata, the former IBM senior vice president and chief brand officer and now lecturer at Yale, the job of the CEO involves the challenge of “refounding” the company. That is, the founder started the organization for a reason, be it a year or a century ago, with a thesis about the business and why it exists beyond the category. Simon Sinek refers to this as a company’s “why;” I like to think of it as the company’s conviction. It’s what they believe and are willing to stand for, even if it means losing business. I find conviction to be much more action-oriented because your organization can have a “why” but veer away from it in the face of inconvenience. However, you can’t be convicted if you aren’t willing to stand for it. Through this lens of refounding, the CEO’s job is to maintain the integrity of the founder’s intended conviction and align it to a holistic operating system within the organization. That operating system, of course, is culture.
Like any culture, the ideology of a company’s conviction informs the way the organization see’s the world and how it engages in it. Over time, as an organization grows and each incremental team member grows further and further away from the founder and their intentions. Consider a start-up with five employees. It’s likely that the sixth employee gets to spend a substantial amount of time with the founder and hear her preach the gospel of the organization’s conviction. The sixth-hundred employee, on the other hand, after the company’s 50th year of operation, not so much. Therefore, there must be a vehicle to evangelize the enduring convictions of the organization. That’s the responsibility of the CEO.
This isn’t merely a matter of proximity; it’s also a factor of context. Take the fictional start-up that grows into a multinational organization sixty years later. Over the course of those decades, the world around the organization changes substantially, which exerts force on how the organization behaves. Societal norms shift. Social expectations evolve. New technologies bloom. The result of these changes subsequently require change from the organization as well. For instance, there was once a time when child labor was considered acceptable, but society changed (thankfully), which necessitated a corresponding organizational change. While these adjustments happen outside the organization, it’s incumbent on its leadership to not merely blow in the wind of change but also stay anchored in its conviction, negotiating the tension between the present (today’s context) and the past (the founder’s intention).
The founder constructed the organization’s point of view of the world in a world that no longer exists. Therefore, as the world around the organization changes and evolves, so, too, must the organization. What does the organization believe and what does that mean today? It’s the CEO’s responsibility to not only regurgitate the convictions of the organization but also recontextualize them for a contemporary world. Like the United States of America was founded 250 years ago on a conviction and a set of policies articulated in the Constitution, these ideas had to be recontextualized for a modern day. Hence, why we have amendments. The same goes for organizations.
This is the job of the CEO, to reenvision the founding beliefs of the organization in a contemporary context and imbed this refounding conviction into the operating system of the organization—its culture. So, perhaps, a more apt title for the CEO would be the chief envisioning officer, the leader whose responsibility is to envision the founder’s intentions in today’s world and activate the company to behave accordingly. This isn’t merely a grammatical subversion, but an entire paradigm shift.
Hear more about the idea of “refounding” in our conversation with Jon Iwata on our latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast.