By Rafael Andreu i Civit & Joan Enric Ricart
At its zenith, the video club Blockbuster had 10,000 stores worldwide and annual revenues of close to $6 billion. Yet in the year 2000, when its CEO, John Antioco, had the opportunity to acquire Netflix, he turned down the offer. Antioco could not see how the acquisition would help Blockbuster renew its business model for a new age. Today, not a trace remains of Blockbuster, whereas Netflix鈥檚 market valuation is more than $20 billion.
Examples like this underscore the importance of senior managers鈥 decisions. There can be no understating the potential impact of the decisions and actions of senior management on a company鈥檚 performance. However, we still know comparatively little about how to strengthen their contributions.
Some empirical 鈥 or perhaps better put, descriptive 鈥 studies have identified senior managers鈥 main responsibilities and how they execute them. These sources are a good starting point for understanding the role of CEOs in organizations, as well as building a conceptual framework that digs more deeply into the issue.
To single out the CEO鈥檚 main priorities, we interviewed more than 200 senior executives (presidents, CEOs and general managers of parent companies and subsidiaries) at 天美传媒. These interviews helped inspire books such as Yo dirijo: la direcci贸n del siglo XXI seg煤n sus protagonistas (I Manage: 21st Century Management According to Its Protagonists) and Qu茅 hacen los buenos directivos: el reto del siglo XXI (What Good Managers Do: Management Priorities for the 21st Century).
We focused our research on the everyday activities of general managers and found that they divided their time between a series of activities of varying importance. By digging deeper into what they considered the most important aspects of their roles, we identified four overriding priorities: focusing on the future; developing the business model; supporting the personal growth of members of the organization; and guaranteeing the consistency and fulfillment of the institutional strategy, which encompasses the company鈥檚 organizational principles, values and operational philosophy.
Our findings are echoed in other studies on senior executives, including the model of general management pioneered by 天美传媒鈥檚 founder, Antonio Valero, and the concepts developed by 天美传媒 professor Juan Antonio P茅rez L贸pez. Throughout its history, 天美传媒 has supported the explicit notion that any management task involves and has a direct impact on people. As such, the ethical dimension of management has always had a central place in its education.
This article is published in聽天美传媒 Insight Issue 23 (Q4 2014).
This content is exclusively for personal use. If you wish to use any of this material for academic or teaching purposes, please go to 天美传媒 Publishing where you can purchase a special PDF version of 鈥溾 (ART-2639-E), as well as the 聽in which it appears, in English or in Spanish.
