This e-book is for leaders who want to excel by using information technology (IT) as a catalyst to transform their businesses. It is divided into four areas: Becoming a Transformational Leader, Leaders as IT Strategists, Leaders as Sales and Business Development Strategists and The CEO as a Leader of Disruptive Change

1. The Effective
Leader’s Guide to
Enterprise Software:
Competing with Intensity and Insight in Turbulent Times
Global Strategic Partner
for Manufacturing

2. A CEO's priorities have
a direct impact on profits.
How and where CEOs
invest their time has a A Leader’s Guide
direct impact on the This e-book is for leaders
performance of their firms. who want to excel
by using information
Many leaders agree that technology (IT) as a
setting vision and strategy, catalyst to transform
planning acquisitions and their businesses. It is
investments, motivating and divided into four areas:
leading their employees to
excel and contributing to • Becoming a
business development and Transformational Leader
sales management are all
high priorities. Many CEOs • Leaders as IT Strategists
and general managers are
challenged with getting their • Leaders as Sales
companies to execute as well. and Business
Development Strategists
Given the proliferation of social
media and the quickening • The CEO as a Leader
pace of new ventures, these of Disruptive Change
leaders are often also the
company spokespeople on all
new developments.
From the new start-up to the suites of Fortune 100 companies,
the challenges are the same. Leaders successfully guiding their
companies through these turbulent times share a passion for making
the most of all available intelligence, insight and information. They
also excel as IT strategists, aligning the complexity of information
systems in their organizations to strategic priorities and goals.
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3. The First Four Steps on the Fast Track to Becoming
a Transformational Leader
If you think about the best bosses you ever had, the ones you’d
run through a brick wall for, they did four things really well—not
just for you, but for everyone on the team. And they did these
four things with amazing authenticity and transparency. Today’s
emerging and longstanding leaders have added technology to
further support and strengthen their roles. What can you do?
1. Show that every person matters. The greatest leaders have this
down to an art form. They use enterprise software to connect
with every employee, showing sometimes in real time how a
business is doing. Leaders have very high expectations of
technology in keeping their teams together. In fact, they
have higher expectations than the CIOs when it comes to
the transformational value of IT (Johnson, Lederer, 2007)1.
2. Create a culture that thrives on learning and intelligence.
Transformational leaders know that their best performers
aren’t there for the paycheck; they are there for the challenge.
A strong CEO and leader will use IT to create collaboration
and communication opportunities throughout the entire
organization, and this includes CRM, ERP, SCM and many
other enterprise systems. Leaders and CEOs who are thriving
now are focused on making these enterprise systems unified
to create a world-class learning culture.
3. Inspire by doing more than you expect others to do. The
greatest leaders all share this trait; they are willing to sacrifice
far more than they would ever ask a subordinate to do. This
breeds exceptional trust and gives everyone a very clear idea
of how their contributions matter. Great CEOs are building
enterprise systems today that further strengthen this with
real-time feedback; not just employee performance, but the
performance of strategies and key customer-facing processes.
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4. 4. Build accountability into their enterprise systems and regularly
revisit its effectiveness. One CEO I know regularly visits
customers and provides contributions to the company CRM
system after each visit. He does his own comments on the
records of other C-level and senior-management teams he
meets. His and the senior-management team’s system usage
is visible for anyone on the CRM system to see. This led to
the CRM system being adopted by more than 15 percent of
sales personnel within three days.
Great Leaders Are Also IT Strategists
Three Strategic IT Priorities
1. Projects that enable the company to develop and offer new
products and services more efficiently and in less time
2. Projects that provide new decision support information to
top, middle and lower levels of management
3. Projects that use existing and planned IT investments to find
new ways for the enterprise to compete
The most successful leaders use their transformational leadership
skills to get these three strategic priorities accomplished, while
making sure that every aspect of the business stays synchronized.
To get a sense of how difficult this is to do well, see the Gartner
Demand Driven Value Network (DDVN) in Figure 1. This is a graphical
illustration of how complex the collaboration, communication and
synchronization challenges are for CEOs today.
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5. Figure 1: Demand-Driven Value Network
Coordinating the Demand, Supply and Product networks is
complicated by the fact that there isn’t an abundance of
overlap and that each network has a tendency to go in their
own direction.
Not only must a CEO keep the Demand Networks tightly
coordinated to Supply Networks, the existing product strategies
and often highly complex new product-development and
introduction (NPDI) process in the Product Networks area must be
coordinated. The role of enterprise software in general and the
ERP system specifically is to orchestrate these three strategic
networks of a business. When one considers that each of the
networks shown (Demand, Supply and Product) have a natural
tendency to go off on their own direction, it becomes clear
that cost-reduction strategies alone in enterprise software are
extremely tactical in nature.
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6. Coordinating the Demand, Supply and Product Networks
What’s needed is a way to orchestrate all three networks into a
single, unified and highly powerful strategy.
The highest-performing leaders today are using enterprise software
as an accelerator to their vision and goals. They also realize that
only by aligning ERP systems to their top three priorities will their
businesses have a chance to break through a market’s turbulence
and competitive chaos to succeed. One of the most powerful
strategies for accomplishing this is aligning the ERP system to the
need for more accurate, precise information about new markets.
One of the most effective transformational leader’s secret
weapons: a two-tier ERP strategy.
Get Insight to Compete with Intensity:
How Two-Tier ERP Strategies Can Help
As IT strategists, leaders are guiding their organizations to
attain higher levels of agility than ever before. The longstanding
assumption of having a single ERP system to serve a diverse,
growing global enterprise is changing fast. No longer can a
single monolithic system keep up with the diverse strategic
needs of a company that’s attempting to penetrate entirely
new foreign markets.
Two-tier ERP systems are giving enterprises the agility they need
to compete more effectively. Hewlett-Packard used this strategy
to create factories that are specifically designed to create more
effective Asian supply chains while also gathering local market
requirements to the strategy.
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7. In any conversation regarding two-tier ERP strategy, the Harvard
Business Review article, “Making the Most of Foreign Factories”
by Dr. Kasra Fedrows surfaces2. Dr. Fedrows has completed
decades of research on what makes distributed manufacturing
centers globally successful.
The Roles of Foreign Factories: A Strategic Matrix, Figure 2,
shows how site competence should lead the strategic reason
for the site, and mirrors Dr. Fedrows’ research.
Figure 2: The Roles of Foreign Factories: a Strategic Matrix
High
Lead
Contributor
Site Competence
Source
Server
Offshore
Low Outpost
Access to low-cost Access to skills and Proximity to market
production knowledge
Strategic Reason for the Site
Two-tier ERP systems enable global enterprises to match the
unique local requirements of every market.
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8. The CEO as Sales and Business
Development Champion
Many leadership experts contend that the best CEOs come out
of sales, while an entirely different set of studies offers operations
as the best path to the top job. Those citing operations show
that in manufacturing and highly complex enterprise businesses,
operations provides the CEO with a unique, global view of the
business—a view that otherwise would have to be learned on
the job (Koyuncu, Firfiray, Claes, Hamori, 2010)3.
Regardless of background, a CEO must excel at orchestrating
customer-relationship and selling strategies, long-term business
acquisition and project execution. Figure 3 shows how these three
areas intersect and how critical it is to have a strong enterprise
program management strategy to have 360-degree views of
these areas.
Figure 3: Getting to Optimal CEO Performance: Finding the Intersection
of Strategy, Acquisition and Execution in Your Company
Bottom Line: CEOs who excel in their roles as sales and
business-development leaders deliberately set up internal
governance and compliance frameworks supported by enterprise
software to free up their time for customers and selling.
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9. The need for process spectrum flexibility, enterprise-wide process
orchestration and decision management including analytics are also
key. Figure 3 shows the unique role of the CEO as orchestrating
these three core areas as well. Business development and sales
are areas where the majority of CEOs say they want to spend
more time yet can’t due to time constraints.
The CEO as a Passionate Leader
of Disruptive Change
Both the person who aspires to be a CEO and the individual
serving as one today needs a very clear, compelling vision of
their company that is centered on the customer. They also have
to be so passionate and believe so strongly in the vision of what
they are doing that they willingly sacrifice for it and inspire others
to do the same. There must be a compelling reason for the entire
company to go through a significant change and ride through
turbulent times, emerging stronger for it. And that compelling
reason must be solidly based on the customer and delivering
them exceptional value daily. That only happens when they are
galvanized around customer-based vision.
But how do the highest-performing CEOs make their visions of
being a customer-centric business turn into great results? By being
passionate and entirely focused on the attainment of challenging
goals, regardless of market uncertainty or turbulence in their
industries. They push through those obstacles and knock down
one goal after another, undaunted.
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10. How? By creating teams who believe they can, by setting up teams
to win and by balancing short-term (transactional leadership) with
long-term (transformational leadership) goals. They also do this
by balancing transactional leadership skills that reward immediate
performance with a compelling vision of the future everyone can
identify with.
Figure 4: Transformational Balance
Balancing short-term needs while making progress toward long-term
goals is the mark of a true transformational leader.
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11. The balance of transactional and transformational leadership is
what separates the highest-performing CEOs who deliver great
results year after year. This ability to move between transactional
and transformational leadership has to be based on trust to
succeed. The best CEOs get it. They realize trust is the catalyst
of disruptive change, and information technology can make
them more effective as leaders of change.
Eight Key Takeaways for Transformational Leaders
1. The highest-performing leaders and CEOs have developed a
strong set of transformational leadership skills and continually
work to improve them. These transformational leadership skills,
including emotional intelligence, help the highest-performing
CEOs move quickly between their roles of IT strategist, sales and
business development leader and leader of disruptive change.
2. CEOs who are IT strategists are able to better align their
existing and planned IT systems to challenging and highly
profitable customer-driven strategies. Measuring the
performance of IT systems by their contribution to gross
contribution margin (GCM), Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)
and the success of multichannel selling and service strategies
is more important than just measuring cost reduction.
3. Efficiency only matters when it’s measured from the customers’
standpoint, not from internal metrics. The top-performing
CEOs who are IT strategists are able to define analytics and
metrics that measure collaboration that meet and exceed
customer expectations first. These CEOs seek to architect their
systems so that customer expectations get met and exceeded
as a result of having excellent internal system performance
and coordination.
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12. 4. Using two-tier ERP strategies as a strong catalyst of global
competitiveness and gaining the critical intelligence and
insight that’s necessary to excel in new markets is a must-do.
Each regional, national or foreign market has its own unique
attributes, characteristics and cultural factors that influence the
quality of information in IT systems. Having an ERP system in
specific subsidiaries, especially for manufacturing companies,
can mean the difference between staying competitive or not.
The greater the quality of information in a subsidiary the
greater the agility. CEOs who are IT strategists are relying on
two-tier ERP as a means to quickly enter new markets and
get operations up and running quickly.
5. Excelling as an IT strategist requires a leader to see IT
systems as sources of differentiation not just cost reduction.
The highest-performing CEOs are championing these three
priorities within their organizations today, making sure that IT
systems align to their attainment:
a. Projects that will allow the company to develop and offer
new products and services more efficiently and in less time
b. Projects whose primary benefit is providing new decision
support information to top, middle and lower levels
of management
c. Projects that use existing and planned IT investments to
find new ways for the enterprise to compete
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13. 6. Be ruthless about aligning IT systems to customer
requirements to excel in the role of Sales and Business
Development Strategist. From GE with their Six Sigma
programs that are specifically designed to keep their products
aligned to customer needs, to FedEx and their world-class
approach to tracking customer packages, making IT systems
align to customer requirements is critical to succeed.
7. Leaders of disruptive change start with a compelling
customer-centered vision and use IT to galvanize
their companies around it. CEOs who have exceptional
transformational skills have the ability to balance short- and
long-term goals while keeping their enterprises focused on
excelling for the customer. Using IT as the catalyst of making
disruptive change permanent are what these CEOs are capable
of achieving. We’ve provided a graphic of how this dynamic
works in Figure 3.
8. Most important of all, a leader lives the vision. Daily, with
passion, they lay it all on the line, and people respect and
trust them for it.
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14. References
1
Johnson, A. M., & Lederer, A. L. (2007). The impact of
communication between CEOs and CIOs on their shared
views of the current and future role of IT. Information Systems
Management, 24(1), 85-90.
2
Fedrows, K. (1997), Making the most of foreign factories.
Harvard Business Review, 75(2), 73-88.
3
Koyuncu, B., Firfiray, S., Claes, B., & Hamori, M. (2010). CEOs
with a functional background in operations: Reviewing their
performance and prevalence in the top post. Human Resource
Management, 49(5), 869.
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Dynamics is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other trademarks belong to
their respective companies.
© 2012 Cincom Systems, Inc.
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