What Your CEO Is Reading


Becoming more strategic: Three tips for any executive. “We are entering the age of the strategist,” the McKinsey Quarterly’s Michael Birshan and Jayanti Kar tell us, where companies invest more time and involve a greater number of  senior leaders in strategic dialogue to stay atop “today’s more volatile environment.” But it’s not enough to invite discussion from C-suite holders willy-nilly. Many executives are not be black-belt strategists–their paths to the top having been accomplished more by functional expertise or an ability to execute than strategic thinking. McKinsey shares three tips to help those executives perform in the boardroom as well as they have in their operational roles. First, executives need to understand strategy, not as a general idea, but what it means in their industry. Implicit is an understanding of the “economics, psychology, and laws of their industries, so that context can guide them continually.” Executives should also be able to identify potential disruptors, including companies off the competitive radar. Finally, they should develop a way to communicate strategy to their direct reports—weekly meetings are great, but using technology to visually illustrate concepts is better.

How brands can fight back. Corporate gadflies once held the online edge, with the ability to mobilize armies to seed social media outlets with sound bites, and optimizing Web sites to guarantee that their protest pages ranked high in Google searches. Now, more companies are getting better at crafting their corporate image online, writes Businessweek’s Felix Gillette. They’re better able to identify possible targets of outrage and then create a war chest of pre-emptive content they can unleash when needed. Many companies supplement their online messaging by buying ads on Google that target keywords associated with “boycott” or “protest.” Chevron, no stranger to controversy, created sites and sponsored links on Google’s search to offset blowback relating to a lawsuit over its environmental practices in Ecuador. Social media monitoring software plays a big role too, helping a brand tell “exactly many people are expressing disgust and whether the outrage is growing or dissipating.”

Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo

One take on how Capitol Hill politicking could let hackers turn off the lights. Contrary to the old adage about success having many fathers and failure being an orphan, Foreign Policy’s James Andrew Lewis finds many, many fathers behind Washington’s failure to pass a comprehensive cybersecurity bill protecting the nation’s infrastructure. In the months since a Republican-led task force published a cybersecurity report recommending, among other things, a regulation of critical infrastructure, privacy fears, fears of overweening government power, small government ideology and the usual wackiness associated with an election year, have created watered-down cybersecurity bills that please no one, Lewis writes. For now, the fate of future bill rests with the “larger and damaging political debate on the role of government,” writes Lewis. The likely outcome, say observers, is that the U.S. won’t get effective legislation until the first real national cyber-crisis. “[The] country will then overreact, trampling privacy and putting in place rigid requirements.”


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