Madrid, 29 January 2020 - The digital transformation of companies and the cultural change that accompanies it are defining a new profile for the CEO and new responsibilities, according to Pedro Moneo, CEO and founder of global innovation consultancy Firm Opinno. "The role of the CEO is becoming more and more like that of an entrepreneur," said Moneo at a conference on leadership this morning organized by APD in Madrid together with large innovative companies such as Cabify, Indeed, BBVA, Sanitas, Fundación ONCE, Puleva and British American Tobacco.
Moneo pointed out that highly innovative organizations are very sensitive to talent, and so a fundamental task of the CEO is to help define and defend the organization's values, which are what will make possible to attract, and retain the best talent in the market. In addition, the CEO must be a spokesperson and guide for change. Highly innovative organisations are going to be subject to many tensions of change, which generate confusion and disorientation within the work teams "and the CEO - explained Moneo - must be like a guiding light that, when team members become disoriented, he reminds them of the mission and direction in which they must work, which implies maintaining a long-term vision in spite of the day-to-day setbacks".
According to Opinno's CEO, the decisions we make today determine the organization's long-term future "and the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Vision and retrospective analysis are good ways to know how our organization can remain relevant in the future and continue to evolve as it adapts to change.”
Culture of Innovation
For Pedro Moneo, the innovative company model has three characteristics: "it is connected to an ecosystem, it does not innovate by itself in order to expand the capacity to capture value beyond the limits of its own organization. It must be agile, it has to be in tune with the times, reducing the time from conceptualization to market is fundamental. And it must be customer-centric, oriented to understanding the customer's reality and prioritizing based on market data. In addition, the company's mission must be challenging and motivating, but always achievable. The values must be real.
Innovative leadership
Opinno has identified five qualities that are repetitive in leaders and innovative teams. The first is leadership, vision, vocation to change things, to think big. The second is curiosity to learn, ability to listen, creativity. The third is the search for excellence, being committed to work. The fourth is empathy, working well in a team. The fifth is to be honest and upright and to be concerned about the final impact of your work.
Collaborative talent
According to Pedro Moneo, digital transformation demands professionals specialized in increasingly concrete and sophisticated areas of knowledge, which are also frequently renewed and require constant training and recycling of experts. "In Opinno we have discovered that the best talent in the world does not want to be on the payroll, which has led us to rethink the consulting business in the future, and the answer is that consulting must and will be disrupted by collaborative models".
A new model where consulting firms will have smaller cores and larger networks of experts participating in projects aligned with their area of expertise. "In Opinno -concludes Moneo- we actively work with a large network of experts in our consulting projects, but we keep the project managers as our own staff. A hybrid model between traditional consulting and collaborative economy, which allows us to keep close to our clients and ensure the quality of our work, while being scalable and specialized in any technological field".
