Character of leadership is key to the future

Crisis does not build character but reveals it, confronting company leaders today with a dramatic moment of truth. As they shift from responding to COVID-19 to coping with its unpredictable aftermath, the real test of character will not be how they react but how they foresee.

Leadership will hitherto be judged by its ability to shape a new future that harnesses innovation and marries it with sustainability to master the permanent changes shaping our era – in short, every leader will need to be a technology leader.

By bringing into sharp focus inflexible operations, fragile supply chains, untrustworthy data, and new customer needs, the pandemic exposed the limits of digital transformation to date and underlined the need to accelerate.

Pioneering leaders with the most competitive instinct are now looking anew at the role of innovation as a lifeline in an uncertain world – and recognising that their role in the new economy must, first and foremost, be technological leadership.

Technology transformation

Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021 report predicting key trends set to shape businesses explores just how transformative technology has been during the pandemic. The crisis radically accelerated changes companies saw on the horizon but did not expect so soon: industry convergence, localised supply chains, mass virtualisation, and a revolution in customer expectations.

It also underlined the strategic value of undertaking a “twin transformation” that fuses digital and sustainable change to gain a huge competitive advantage. Visionaries are responding by accelerating digitisation, with Accenture data indicating that companies relying on a strong digital core to adapt and innovate at pace are growing revenues five times faster than laggards. It is hardly surprising that a staggering 92% of business leaders are now innovating with urgency – and for many this will be the factor determining who sinks and swims.

For example, 60% of restaurants “temporarily closed” on Yelp last July were out of business by September, but Starbucks bucked the trend using technology – expanding customer and retail channels through its app, mobile ordering and drive-thru. To respond effectively and avoid falling behind rivals, more European companies need to accelerate their digital transformation. It is encouraging to see Europe edging ahead of global peers in early experimentation with transformational technologies such as 5G. In short, we stand at a threshold where the need for reinvention demands a new kind of leadership that responds to powerful new trends.

Competition, for example, is becoming a battle of technology stacks as companies compete on their IT architecture: 89% of executives believe this will increasingly determine business value. While European companies largely match developments elsewhere in the world, our survey shows them ahead of the global average (by 3%) in keeping societal objectives and visionary technology goals at the core of organisational strategy – aligning them well with European values. Leaders must embrace the potential of digital twins to unlock the trapped value of data and simulate, predict and automate, with 65% of executives expecting such investments to soar.

Yet only 54% European companies plan to do so in the future – probably because of how they use digital twins. For example, they are more likely than global peers to limit their use of digital twins to two top priorities: cybersecurity and personnel training. They are much less likely to use them for innovation or developing new business models. And at every turn the technological imperative is democratic, demanding root and branch organisational reform that equips each worker with tools and skills to innovate at the point of need.

Future perfect

A set of new imperatives shaping the future are combining to test the mettle of business leaders. Front-runners will be those putting technology at the forefront of strategy for whom change is not disruption but opportunity.

Take the Exscalate4CoV consortium under Italian bio-pharma company Dompé, which conducted the biggest supercomputing experiment ever done on the SARS-CoV-2 virus to find COVID-19 drugs. The best way to predict the future is to invent it, and true leadership will emerge from embracing radically different mindsets to confront deep-seated assumptions. When the UK faced a critical shortage of ventilators, for example, Rolls-Royce redesigned its entire supply chain to make this device – and launched production within weeks.

Lastly, leaders will no longer be judged solely on profitability, and technological change will reflect their embrace of broader social responsibilities that expand the definition of value to include well-being, sustainability and inclusion. Danone, for example, publishes fiscal results with a “carbon-adjusted” metric.

Such imperatives confront leadership as we have known it with an existential challenge. Business leaders cannot afford to hesitate: boundless opportunity awaits those willing to break from the status quo ante to craft a status futurus.