Let’s start with a visual, shall we?
Look at this, from some early 2022 IBM report about “CEO priorities.”
As you can see, there are six — which is generally way too many for an executive to have, since the “cost management” one is typically the only one they will pay any attention to anyway — and they’re all over the place. At this point, “digital transformation” is a complete buzzword. In reality it means “Make sure Brenda saves her stuff in the cloud and not in her filing cabinet,” but that doesn’t sound tech-y enough to say, so we bring in consultants and gussy it up in lots of stuff. And meanwhile we’re supposed to focus on “enterprise agility” and safety and customer retention, all at once?
How much of this will actually get done?
The sad, and short, answer is “very little.” Many of these executives will nod at these terms in all-hands meetings, but will spend most of their year focused on cost containment, putting out fires, short-term goals, and things that can up their bonus and incentive structure. Very little else will be focused on, despite everything being “a priority.”
