The session was held as the study approached the two thirds mark of its research phase, over two days in April, hosted at the IRG offices in Amsterdam and on Zoom.
The welcome pack sets the preparation. Participants were asked to come with an open mind and to review a 45 minute Harvard Business Review podcast on shareholder value and a 30 minute context and background presentation.
Key findings
- Day one ran through the preliminary learnings of four separate research strands: IRG’s own, Yale’s CEO interviews, China insights from CKGSB, and CHRO insights.
- Each presentation was followed by a reflections and question slot facilitated by a different person, so that no single voice ran the whole day.
- Day two opened with 45 minutes of reflections and key learnings from day one, then the preliminary CEO profile learnings from Spencer Stuart, and a review of additional key learnings per survey question.
- The session ends not with conclusions but with a slot on what additional data, research and focus still needs to be gathered.
Who was in the room
The partner list spans research, academia, executive search, human resources, governance and industry bodies. Yale is represented by the founder of its Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management, established in 2022 to help leaders more effectively create economic and societal value.
Oxford is represented by the academic lead on the study, described as a leading academic voice on the technology-centric future of the marketing, media and advertising industries, and by a mathematician whose work applies mathematics to social networks and echo chambers, trend forecasting, multi-touch attribution and artificial intelligence.
The leadership strand came from Spencer Stuart, whose consultant has 25 years of experience designing leadership development and assessment programs, including work on CEO succession candidates. The HR strand came from Kennedy Fitch, including a former chief employee experience officer.
Industry bodies included the ANA, whose representative leads the Global CMO Growth Council in partnership with Cannes Lions, the Page Society, described as the premier membership organization for chief communications officers of Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies, and NACD, whose representative leads its certification and Fortune 500 advisory councils.
The B Team was represented by its chief executive, who has spent years pursuing purpose-driven, gender-balanced and principled leadership, co-founded an investment firm built on incorporating feminine values and ESG metrics into finance, and ran for president of Iceland as an independent, moving from 1 percent in the polls to runner-up with nearly 30 percent of the vote.
The institute’s own account of itself
The bios repeat a consistent description of the institute: a not-for-profit organization that helps CMOs and other growth leaders drive more humanized growth by connecting them to peers and experts through live-action programs inspired by thought leadership. By mid-2022 more than 400 CMOs and other growth leaders had participated in its programs.
The community it draws on is put at more than 450 global CMOs and other growth leaders, managed by a community director who describes the role as being the eyes and ears of the community.
The founders’ track record is stated in the same pack: two Harvard Business Review cover articles, Building an Insights Engine in 2016 and The Ultimate Marketing Machine in 2014, the latter described as the best-selling issue in the entire history of the magazine.
Scope and limitations
This is a welcome pack and agenda rather than a record of what was said. Everything it presents is marked preliminary, and the session was scheduled to end on what still had to be gathered.
Source
This page summarises AMI – Spaghetti Session, by Andrew Stephen, Frank van den Driest, Marc de Swaan Arons, April 2023.