<div><em><strong>Abhay Kumar </strong>explains </em><em>what leadership styles and skills successful CEOs need to possess to take their organizations into the next decade</em></div><div> </div><div>Introducing innovation at the speed of light is tough enough for today's service providers. Combine that with ongoing regulatory changes and ever increasing competition from consolidated players and over-the-top entrants and the picture becomes clear.</div><div> </div><div>CEOs are in the spotlight to successfully steer their organizations through significant transformation to stay ahead of the competition and profitably grow the business. If these are the challenges CEOs face today, what can they expect in 2020? More specifically, what leadership styles, qualities, skills and approaches will successful CEOs need to possess to take their organizations into the next decade?</div><div> </div><div>These were the questions that a new global study, commissioned by Amdocs with strategy consultancy Telesperience, sought to answer. In-depth interviews with CEOs, C-suite and other senior management executives at the world's top-tier service providers, including some of the largest in Asia Pacific (Apac), provided insights that uncovered views and forecasts for how CEOs will be running their organizations in 2020.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Management Styles Are Changing</strong></div><div>The typical CEO has worked in different countries and even regions and has held at least three different roles at their current company. But professional diversity may not be enough to be effective in 2020. The survey found that the majority of senior executives in Apac (78 per cent) believe current CEO management styles need to change for them to remain successful five years from now.</div><div> </div><div>Fast-forward to 2020 and what makes an Apac CEO successful today will not be the recipe for future needs. The local industry believes collaborative styles will be needed to allow service providers to scale into the future. This means moving away from today’s favored styles of pacesetting and commanding, where the CEO is expected to have a clear roadmap of where the company is going and lead it there by example, to coaching, which values the contribution of others, connecting individuals’ goals to those of the organization.</div><div> </div><div>The majority of the executives who took part in the survey (67 per cent) also believe Apac CEOs in 2020 should be driven by a passion for innovation, and would provide the most value to their organizations through good corporate governance (1st) followed immediately by innovation (2nd).</div><div> </div><div><strong>The Changing Face Of C-suites </strong></div><div>In Apac it’s not just the CEO leadership style that will change. New areas of focus and lines of business are already opening new C-level opportunities. Respondents cited that today the most commonly added roles hold responsibility for customer experience (1st), innovation and commercial activities (tied 2nd). Roles covering innovation, commercial, social, cloud, privacy and people tied for second place. Executives predicted that by 2020, new C-level roles would also include big data and digital (tied 1st).</div><div> </div><div>Today's C-suite team is likely to be the breeding ground for future CEOs. So it's interesting that 78 per cent of senior Apac executives believe that the CEO in 2020 will most likely come from CFO background, implying CEOs are expected to drive innovation while keeping the numbers right.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Innovate While Minimizing Expense And Risk Barriers</strong></div><div>The top barrier to Apac CEOs' success by 2020 will be “inability to support or execute change”, ahead of “lack of clear strategy” (2nd) and “competition” (3rd). So it’s unsurprising that the region’s senior executives plan to invest in outsourcing strategies to supplement internal resources in support of innovation investment imperatives. In 2020, Apac CEOs are most likely to invest in:</div><div>1st place: Cloud services </div><div>2nd place: Customer experience </div><div>3rd place: Big data analytics</div><div> </div><div>To drive change it is believed that a blended approach of both outsourcing and insourcing will be required. For example, more than half are expected to outsource at least some support for cloud services (67 per cent), big data analytics (56 per cent) and digital services (56 per cent).</div><div> </div><div>2020 is very much in the near future and this study suggests that the current generation of senior executives are already pondering their needs for continued industry leadership. Expecting to be challenged in 2020 with turning good ideas into concrete results quickly, APAC service providers believe CEOs will require a variety of skills and a collaborative approach to innovation and business, and plan to turn to external expertise and resources, such as professional services and outsourcing vendors, as a way to break innovation bottlenecks.</div><div> </div><div>In The New World of Customer ExperienceTM customers expect to be inspired and excited by a constant drum of new services, delivered in an intelligent manner through personalization and contextualization and shaped by a dynamic quality of experience regardless of device or network. And all this needs to be accomplished in a manner that accelerates business value for the service provider, speeding time to market, optimizing business processes and reducing costs. As players continue to consolidate, innovation is increasingly challenged by backend system complexity, impacting service providers’ ability to deliver on customer expectations.</div><div> </div><div>Professional and managed services vendors that offer innovative IT and business services which deliver business value, drive immediate operational improvements without lengthy software integration, together with global best practices and a worldwide 24/7 support model, can help these large companies move as fast as they need, while ensuring an efficient cost structure. This type of partnership enables service providers to gain advantages from best practices accumulated from projects around the world, enabling them to achieve desired results faster and with less risk. With a joint commitment to business results, service providers can rely on such partnerships to ensure business growth.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div><em>The author is regional vice president, Asia Pacific, Amdocs</em></div>
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