The world of leadership just got slower, it also just got a lot faster. This last week saw the retirement of a number of world leaders. Their average age was just over 21, they worked for an average of just under 3 hours a day and yet they managed to hold the market leader space for nearly 24 years. The demise of Concorde has been big news. The ability for leaders to travel across the Atlantic at a cruising speed of 1336 miles per hour has been a defining factor in many leading organisations over the last 20 years. Leaving in the morning, this remarkable aircraft, that set the trans-Atlantic record of 2 hours, 54 minutes and 41 seconds, could get you into New York for breakfast, have a good day of meetings and get you back to the UK for supper. With its passing, the lives of those who regularly cross the pond just got a lot slower with flying time from London to New York going back to a minimum of 6 hours 50 minutes (sadly this excludes hours wasted in a holding pattern!).

At the same time it seems that the world of many senior corporate personnel just got a lot faster. In an unprecedented display of shareholder intervention, institutional investors managed to oust the Chairman of the newly formed ITV that resulted from the merger of Granada and Carlton (the two main commercial television companies in the UK). It seemed that one minute Michael Green was celebrating the creation of this £4.2 billion entity and his new board appointed role as CEO and the next minute he was packing his bags because the key shareholders wanted him out. After some initial tussle with the board who stated strongly they were going to ‘stick by their man’, they soon caved in to ‘Shareholder Power’ and he was gone. The repercussions of this rapid and decisive display of shareholder influence are still to be fully realised. What is clear is that a precedent has been set, some new lines have been drawn and consequently the lives of numbers of senior executives within publicly owned corporations have just got a lot faster.

In almost prophetic tone, the Economist last week carried out a survey (see www.economist.com/surveys) on the increasing pressures and challenges facing senior executives. The decline in public trust, the increase of Corporate Governance, heightened expectation from shareholders hankering back to the wonder years of the 90’s and the seemingly unrelenting pressure to deliver better results faster with less resources, prompted one senior UK businessman to declare ‘I spend my life advising friends of mine not to become chief executives of quoted companies and by and large they take my advice’. John Kotter of HBS summarises the mood well when he stated ‘The pressure people are feeling at the top of organisations is unbelievable’.

This trend seems to be unlikely to change in the coming months hence the ‘slowing’ impact of Concorde’s demise may not be entirely negative. In the midst of the vortex of these pressures, the value of time for genuine reflection cannot be understated. A Signify mantra is ‘Without reflection comes regression’. In our work with executives the opportunity for space to think, ponder and just chew over the momentous decisions they are having to make, is one of their greatest expressed needs. Although the clouds look a little different from the edge of space on Concorde, this ‘time-salvage’ on an Airbus could be an unexpected silver lining.

Phil Wall
CEO