I was just reading through the results of the 2010 IBM Global CEO study.  The study interviews roughly 1500 CEOs, section heads, and division leaders from around the globe.  Anyone who has worked with leaders over the past  decade will be familiar with the 3 of the 4 key results.

• Today’s complexity is only expected to rise and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organisations we call them ‘Standouts’ has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
• Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organisations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realise their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
• The most successful organisations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number one priority.
• Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organisations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.

Discussions of increasing complexity, new product creation, and integrating customer needs have been happening for most of the last decade.  What struck me as new however was the recognition on part of business leaders that creativity may prove to be the most important leadership quality.   Leaders around the globe are recognizing that winners in a knowledge based economy will themselves think creatively, and more importantly, will be organizing their businesses to leverage creativity at all levels.

Masterful leaders keep it together when cold and powerful winds blow, going beyond mere bravado to deep calm. My friend Todd Levy, founder of Global Cloud, and I were discussing the confidence benefit that leaders experience in mastery when Todd commented casually that “the percentage of people who truly operate at that level is probably one percent of the one percent.” One is a thousand. That’s probably pretty close to the truth, but it’s definitely too low to accept. Actually, come to think of it, it sounds too high. But what would happen if a solid one percent got there? We’d see a cadre of leaders sparking new ideas and demonstrating calm in a storm. What about ten percent got close? We’d see an organization on fire. And what if forty to sixty percent of an organization got a taste of the confidence of mastery, thought in terms of mastery, shared the language of mastery, and challenged and supported each other to move the needle toward mastery each day? It wouldn’t be good to great, it would be good to legendary. The challenge is how to bring this to business. That’s where Archos comes in. We help leaders, teams, and organizations in challenging situations to move beyond effort, denial, deflection, and bravado and to build abiding and embedded confidence. This is a hallmark of mastery and a driver of sustainable peak performance.

While it remains an open question if or to what degree BP acted recklessly and unethically in its management of the Deepwater Horizon well, it doesn’t look good. But putting those crucial issues, as well as the utter devastation to life, lives, and livlihoods in the gulf aside for a moment, we’d like to take a few moments to consider BP’s challenges regarding Brand Resilience and Stakeholder-driven ethics.

Resilience

Resilience is a key driver of sustainable peak performance. More than conventional strength, it is the ability to maintain forward momentum and even flourish not simply despite, but because of significant challenges. We identify seven Pillars of Resilience: Navigating Uncertainty, Meaning-Making, Relation and Connection, Forgiveness and Reconciliation, Brand Expression, Self-Command, and Dynamic Balance.  

With a plunging stock price, crisis management teams a-scrambling, congressional drubbing, possible criminal investigations, and media speculation about BP’s long term survival prospects as an independent going concern, BP’s future is certainly unclear. While it’s best for any organization to build the pillars of resilience proactively, it seems certain that if BP hopes to flourish, it will need to use this experience as an opportunity to seek to grow first in resilience. In the real world, strength requires and even builds of resilience as much or even more than standard business measures.

Ethics

For the sake of discussion, let’s remain agnostic about alleged or real ethical lapses on the part of BP. This muc is certain: we see our Stakeholder-driven Ethics framework, in which ethics are what stakeholders say they are, clearly supported and vindicated by BP’s recent behavior and experience. For better or worse, right or wrong, BP has seen customers, shareholders, strategic partners, two branches of federal  government (so far), the media, and the court of public opinion all pile on to make BP public enemy number one. While a vast number of other wells remain functioning as intended, and the extent to which the decisions that led to the gulf disaster  were driven by a few individuals or a corporate culture (possibly abetted by insufficient or compromised government involvement) remains unclear, the fact remains that just one disaster, driven by specific decisions, is enough to undermine BP’s reputation, despite years of pro-environmental brand advertising. 

Strong dividends and basic humanity are not enough. Regulation and engineering standards are not enough. In order to practice not only environmental sustainability, but sustainable performance, BP and all other organizations need both an embedded stakeholder-driven ethic and a deep foundation of brand resilience.

Ignore this at your peril.

There’s more to it, but this is a start.