Writing in the New York Times, Nelson Schwartz asks whether the time has come for a new type of CEOs.
The key need for today’s CEO seems to be that he/she must be a team builder. Says Prof. Warren Bennis, University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California and a thought leader on leadership: “It’s someone who can assemble a team that functions as smoothly as a jazz sextet,” .
This view is echoed by Michael Useem, William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania & Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management there. Says Prof. Useem: “The academic research says if you want to predict what the future financial performance over the next one to three years will be, you need to know the top team”.
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for executive programs at the School of Management at Yale, says the style of today’s best chief executives differs from both the empire builders and the cleanup specialists.
Business schools are also opting for the 3.0 approach. At the Yale School of Management last year, Mr. Sonnenfeld said, the dean and faculty threw out the old first-year curriculum that emphasized individual disciplines like finance and marketing and replaced it with a team-oriented approach, with professors teaching these subjects jointly. In addition, he said, “We have students, faculty and staff assemble their own teams as part of their training to be future execs.”
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