Column : Cerebral energetic officer

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: new technological opportunity of the Internet by registering a domain name and 2) develop an initial transactional Internet banking service. We also measured how sophisticated the Internet banking service of these banks was by the end of 2001.

We found that banks with CEOs who focused on the future more were faster at detecting the Internet opportunity, faster at developing an initial Internet banking service, and superior at deploying their initial banking service. This was true even when the target of CEO attention was not innovation per se, and even when the innovation outcomes occurred several years later. We measured CEOs’ focus on the future by exploiting a quirk of the English language: future-oriented sentences are likely to include “will”. The number of such sentences in letters to shareholders indicated attention to the future.

Long ago Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad warned: “Senior management devotes less than 3% of its energy to building a corporate perspective of the future.” In our study, only 9.21% of all thoughts (sentences) were future-focused and the percentage of future-focused thoughts among CEOs varied from 0 to 20%. Implication: CEOs can influence innovation in their firms simply by spending more time attending to the future.

Leadership can make all the difference to the innovativeness, success and longevity of a company. CEOs would do well to remember these lessons, as would Obama as he struggles with the many challenges facing him and the US in the weeks and months ahead.