Enterprise transformation has spread across the C-suite. Turning separate efforts into a shared direction is now the defining leadership challenge.
The shift
Reinvention has spread across the C-suite
Most CEOs are running multiple reinvention agendas at once, each with its own objective but no shared logic connecting them. As those efforts spread across functions, businesses and technologies, the challenge is increasingly how to connect them into a coherent whole.
Strategic horizons have compressed
The long term and the medium term now compete within the same planning window. Work that will pay off in years competes for attention, budget and review with work that will pay off in quarters, and the near term often wins. Technology and skill cycles have compressed too. Change arrives faster, leaving organizations less time to absorb it and build the capabilities needed for what comes next.
Short-term performance still matters, and managing investor expectations adds to the pressure on capital, leadership time and organizational focus. Over time, this can leave companies increasingly focused on optimizing the business they have while underinvesting in the one they need to build.
Decisions have moved out
Strategic choices that once sat at the center are increasingly made across the enterprise, closer to markets, technology and customers. The share of companies using highly decentralized decision models has risen sharply. Our research shows the same pattern in today’s environment. Distributed decisions can improve speed and agility, while also allowing strategic alignment to erode quietly.1
Ownership has spread thin
More functions now share responsibility for the same domains: growth, technology, operating model, talent, culture and resilience. Responsibility has expanded. Accountability has not kept up.
Together, these shifts are increasing both the scale and ambition of enterprise reinvention. Accenture’s Pulse of Change finds that 75% of C-suite leaders plan to increase AI investment over the next 12 months, yet only 25% report widespread and sustained value from AI. CEOs also expect the teams that lead enterprise strategy to carry more weight. Our CEO Advisory research finds that 99% expect their impact to grow over the next decade, 92% expect larger budgets and 90% expect more people.
My CEO often asks, ‘Is this something finance should be doing, or is it the CSO’s office?’ [Who owns what] comes up quite frequently. Chief Financial Officer / Global Beverage Manufacturer Company
The effect
The binding constraint is coordination
When decisions about reinvention are distributed, the risk changes shape. Capable teams can each make sound decisions while gradually moving in different directions. Without a clear connection between those decisions, leaders may not see the divergence until it is difficult to correct.
That makes the connective tissue between decisions critical. Leaders increasingly recognize coherence as a foundation of effective strategy, ranking it first among the factors they value. At the same time, the sharp rise in future trend analysis suggests a growing focus on seeing change early enough to keep decisions aligned.
In a volatile environment, earlier signals create value only when leaders can translate them into coordinated action across the enterprise. Signals can show leaders what is changing, but they do not determine which changes matter most for the long term.
As organizations become more focused on detecting and responding to immediate change, other dimensions of strategy can receive less attention. Directional clarity, long-term value creation and ethical and systemic awareness have all declined as priorities.
Companies that allow those factors to erode risk narrowing strategy to the signals directly in front of them, at the expense of a broader view of long-term value.
Reinvention now depends on many parts of the enterprise moving together, making coherence more important than ever.
Our research finds an association between sustained emphasis on coherence and stronger reported results across the enterprise. About half saw their strongest gains in talent, operational resilience, cost and revenue, compared with roughly one third of companies that did not sustain that priority. The difference is even greater among CEOs. Seven in ten who maintained coherence as a priority reported the strongest gains in talent, and six in ten reported the strongest gains in cost compared with fewer than half of other CEOs.
The same pattern does not appear in share price, suggesting that the relationship between coherence and performance is more visible within the enterprise than in the market.
The CEO’s task is to create coherence while preserving strategic direction and a broad view of long-term value.
We remain the voice of long-term direction and coherence, but now we also orchestrate technological innovation, data governance and cultural adaptation. Chief Strategy Officer / Global Consumer Goods Company
The response What an orchestrating CEO does differently
This calls for a different way of running reinvention across the enterprise. The CEO must connect the choices, hand-offs, intelligence and leadership routines that allow the organization to move together.
First, the choices
Leaders need to make the growth priorities, portfolio moves and trade-offs explicit enough that teams can move without drifting apart. When the long term keeps losing to the next quarter, the fix is structural. Define what each horizon is for, protect the capacity attached to it, and make the trade-offs explicit enough for distributed teams to act with confidence.
Consider one global pharmaceutical company. The CEO set a clear objective for the company’s AI initiative, measurable savings in operating expenses. Before redesigning any role or process, leaders first had to agree on a common definition of “captured savings” and apply it consistently across every function.
Second, the seams
CEOs should treat the gaps between functions with the same rigor as the functions themselves, establishing clear decision rights, defining clean hand-offs and ensuring accountability matches where the work now happens.
At one global automaker, local retail teams used AI to improve sales and service metrics. While these efforts delivered local gains, they also led to inconsistencies in the customer experience across the network. The challenge for leadership was to connect those local efforts so improvements in one part of the business supported the goals of the organization as a whole.
Third, the intelligence
Leaders should put the right people, data and AI to work to surface insight and translate it into coordinated action across the enterprise, closing the gap between the speed of insight and the pace of decision-making.
One biotech company, scaling through licensing deals, found its AI could analyze clinical and commercial data faster than ever, surfacing insight daily. Its decision cycles still ran on six-to-twelve-week rhythms. The technology had accelerated the flow of insight, but the organization had not accelerated how quickly it made decisions.
Fourth, the leadership system
Coherence is built through routines, incentives and shared standards that shape how leaders work together. As more reinvention moves across the C-suite, the CEO must keep leaders aligned on the choices, trade-offs and view of long-term value that apply across the enterprise.
At one global financial services firm, the CEO established AI use as a clear organizational priority. AI fluency became part of how professional growth was recognized, while a network of trained AI ambassadors supported teams in building consistent habits. Together, these measures helped embed AI adoption into everyday ways of working.
The CEO choice Direct, delegate or orchestrate
When a system becomes harder to steer, the instinct is often to centralize decisions and pull them back to the top. That can preserve control, but it can also slow decisions and distance them from the markets, customers and technology that shape them. Leaving reinvention entirely to individual parts of the enterprise creates a different risk. Efforts can spread across the enterprise without a shared logic to connect them.
Orchestration gives the CEO a way to connect a distributed enterprise. The CEO sets direction, makes trade-offs and holds leaders accountable while aligning strategic horizons, decision rights, intelligence and leadership routines around those choices. Leaders close to the work retain room to act, while the enterprise stays connected around a common direction. The CEO’s role is increasingly to make sure that reinvention across the enterprise adds up to progress for the enterprise as a whole.
The authors would like to thank Beatriz de Corral, Santiago Salinas, Ana Clara Gimenez, Archana Doreraju, David Kimble, Laura Ross, Jeanine Kent, Laura Bishop, Cristina Matisz and Tomas Castagnino for their contributions to the concept and narrative development, research design and evidence generation, analysis and insight development and editorial and content production.
Source
1 The observation that centralized decision-making is better suited to stable conditions and distributed decision-making to dynamic ones is well established in the management literature. Burns and Stalker (The Management of Innovation, 1961) distinguished mechanistic structures (centralized, hierarchical) suited to stable environments from organic structures (lateral, decentralized) suited to changing ones. Stanley McChrystal (Team of Teams, 2015) argued that centralized command was built for predictable, industrial-age conditions and that complexity and speed now require pushing decision authority down to where the information sits. Peter Drucker made adjacent arguments in his work on federal decentralization (Concept of the Corporation, 1946), and John Kotter set out a related model in his dual operating system, pairing a hierarchy for efficiency with a network for agility (Accelerate, 2014).
Source: View the original article at Accenture.