When it’s time for a career move, many high-calibre candidates often have a number of job offers and will ask our advice on which to take. Sometimes the opportunity to prove yourself by sorting out ‘a mess’ is a sure way of adding some sparkle to your CV. But how do you distinguish between the role that will shoot you to even greater glory and the one which turns out to be a career killer?
In this piece, we speak to three of our senior partners about how to launch a successful plural career. Between them, they have more than fifty years’ experience in recruiting senior executives and Board level directors for large listed businesses and PE backed private businesses and have helped many executives follow the path to a plural portfolio career.
Organisations in the UK have work to do if they want to keep up with digital-native competitors. That’s according to early results from the National Digital Benchmark survey, created alongside Management Consultancy PA Consulting Group and award-winning speaker and author Professor Venkat Venkatraman. The interim results from the survey, which several hundred senior executives have responded to so far, suggest that digital transformation is slow within UK organisations, however awareness of a need to evolve and embrace digital is increasing.
With AI being such a topical subject, we’ve put together a report with the help of IBM, PA Consulting, Forrester, Bioss and a number of other thought leaders in the space to help simplify and summarise the key areas that senior executives should be thinking about when it comes to AI and their business.
Diversity matters. It is important for humanity, for education and, most notably, for business. Diverse leadership teams ignite more creativity and innovation, with a range of backgrounds, experiences and mindsets all contributing to business, customer and product development. This, in turn, encourages and promotes more inclusive attitudes, which attract the top talent that every business needs for fast financial growth.
Savannah Group and Leading Edge Forum recently hosted a breakfast briefing at Savannah’s offices in London to discuss “The Future of the IT Organisation”. Bill Murray of LEF presented key findings from a recent LEF research report, with a subsequent roundtable debate with fifteen CIOs/CTOs and CDOs on whether there will be an IT Organisation in the future.
A decade ago, virtually every CIO role focused on one thing: large scale ERP experience. CIOs marshalled small armies of people and large budgets, whilst being perceived by the business as a back office function whose sole purpose was systems optimisation. Skip forward to today and the vast majority of CIO roles are a hybrid of classic and new; dealing with the challenges of a legacy environment and “digitising” the business.
We recently welcomed a number of CIOs, CTOs and CDOs for a breakfast discussion about the latest technology devices and their current and future business applications. Lewis Richards from the Leading Edge Forum led the discussion and brought with him a number of these devices, giving the senior leaders in attendance the chance to have a hands-on experience.
At Savannah Group we work hard, take pride in what we do and are diligent and honest in our assessment of candidates. We know better than most that finding real talent is hard. Finding real talent with increasingly narrow parameters in a highly competitive market is even harder. Finding the rare individual who is willing to move from the company in which they are in and (no doubt) well looked after is even more difficult.
Digital disruption is a much-discussed topic, but what does a leader do when the industry they have succeeded in begins to erode beneath their feet? Can their skills, experience and deep industry insight transfer to the new world of challenger businesses, or do the skills that helped make them a success actually work against them?
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