The WARTIME CEO

LEADERS MUST ADOPT THE MENTALITY OF BEING AT WAR IF THEY WANT TO SURVIVE THE NEXT 24 MONTHS, SAYS EXPERT LYNDALL SPOONER.

- LYNDALL SPOONER

The events of 2020 have thrown up disruption the like of which many people have never experienced before, and the biggest question for business leaders is, how do we get through this? Lyndall Spooner, Founder and Director of consultancy Fifth Dimension, counters with her own question: “Are you ready to go to war?”

“Business leaders have to adopt a wartime mindset, forcing CEOs to be insanely protective and obsessive over their business’s success,” she says. “Those who don’t, won’t reach desired targets and simply won’t survive.”

According to Lyndall – whose firm has been included in the ‘GreenBook Research Industry Trends’ Top 25 Strategic Consultancies as one of the world’s most innovative companies – the pandemic has left many businesses strategically weak.

“Since March, consumers have undergone swift and lasting change, and so must businesses in order to remain relevant and competitive. How businesses respond will be highly dependent on the quality of their consumer intelligence. The reality is that many companies are making decisions based on poor data.”

Lyndall goes on to state that simple consumer metrics that worked prior to the pandemic, when an economy was growing, will not work moving forward. The benefit of a growth economy is that it can hide and forgive poor management and useless consumer metrics.

“A recession economy fires a blowtorch on these things,” she says. “In a time of economic war, accessing the strongest consumer intelligence with the right KPIs is fundamental to survival. Right when consumer intelligence will become critical to developing winning compete strategies is when businesses will realise whether they have been working with the right or wrong metrics.”