Based on research by Vikas Mittal

This article originally appeared on Chief Executive

According to a 2020 survey, executives spent 44% of their time on non-strategic activities, including day-to-day tactical efforts, unproductive tasks and meetings, politics and firefighting, and convincing others to listen to their point of view.

Why do so many companies come up short in their strategy planning and implementation? Because their CEOs end up playing the role of firefighter, implementer or counselor. Four years of intensive data analysis conducted by the authors has shown the three roles repeatedly emerge, deflecting from strategy and keeping CEOs from elevating their companies.

To truly improve company performance, CEOs must escape the firefighter, implementer and counselor roles and function as strategy leaders.

The Firefighter

The firefighter is a turnaround artist. A company might be struggling due to sudden adverse events or internal foibles. The firefighter swoops in to stabilize the situation.

After Uber Technologies parted ways with its CEO in 2017, the company installed a firefighter CEO while it looked for a new chief executive. In more ways than one, the firefighter takes on the role of an operating officer intent on stabilizing company functioning. But the firefighter does not take on a mandate to shape, lead or implement long-term strategy.

The Implementer

The implementer installs policies and processes to ensure employees perform key tasks with competence. The implementer functions as a caretaking manager who narrows the scope of their remit, delivers on time and stays within budget. The implementer works with middle management and frontline employees to clarify existing goals, policies and initiatives. Implementers are inward-looking and emphasize processes and ongoing initiatives, rather than pinpointing key initiatives or imagining new ways to do things.

For example, a private equity fund retained the chief technology officer of a large company as the CEO of a portfolio company to overhaul its IT infrastructure and implement e-commerce within nine months.

The Counselor

The counselor delegates strategy to others while focusing on relationships, personalities and conflict management. The CEOs then focus on smoothing interpersonal relationships among executives, building teams through hiring and mentoring, empowering their executive teams to act and championing employee engagement and motivation.

For example, the CEO of a healthcare-software startup viewed her role as developing and mentoring young and inexperienced team members. The counselor role can be invaluable for inventors and entrepreneurs launching companies, as the innovators can benefit from mature executive mentorship.

The Strategy Leader

The strategy leader adds value to a company, but not by firefighting, implementing or counseling. The strategy leader helps senior executives focus on customers and rank company-wide priorities. The priorities align the firm’s customers’ most important needs with its senior executives’ time and effort. Guiding sound implementation, the strategy leader helps senior executives develop the correct customer, operational and financial metrics to track employee performance and meet financial targets.

Even strategy leaders must occasionally firefight, counsel and implement. But strategy leaders do not make the functions their priority. They direct their human resources group to counsel, COO to implement and other senior executives to firefight when needed.

The strategy leading CEO focuses the collective energy of senior executives on implementing a clear, simple strategy to satisfy customers’ most important needs. Reassuringly, the process connects the CEO, senior executives and employees directly to their firm’s highest priority customer value drivers.

Case Study: How One CEO Became A Strategy Leader

In this example, an individual became CEO of a construction site management company with $2 billion in sales and more than 5,000 active sites worldwide. A strategy audit showed the company had more than 40 open initiatives that had remained unfinished for many years. Several senior executives disagreed about the company’s direction. The CEO also found a contract for a client with more than 200 sites was underperforming because the site management firm’s service costs were higher than the negotiated price.

The CEO worked with the company’s chief strategy officer to set long-term direction. Using several structured client-assessments they found the company’s two most important customer value drivers and used the results to prioritize their more than 40 open initiatives from most to least impactful. They focused on the six initiatives directly tied to client-value drivers, while pausing or deferring the remaining initiatives. Working with the company’s chief finance and commercial officers, the CEO renegotiated the large customer’s underperforming contract to bring it in line with the most critical value drivers. Determining the company’s customer value drivers also helped resolve differences among regional presidents.

Following the strategy realignment, the site management company’s sales and margins outperformed its peer groups over a one-year period. An executive assessment revealed all senior executives were 100% aligned on strategy by the year’s end, a vast improvement over their initial 21% alignment.

The CEO became a strategy leader by not getting mired into the firefighting, counseling and implementing that consumes many CEOs and, instead, aligning initiatives to customer value drivers.

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Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business.

Shrihari Sridhar is the Joe Foster ’56 Chair in Business Leadership and professor of marketing at Texas A&M University's Mays Business School.

To learn more, please see: Mittal, V., Sridhar, S. (2021). Focus: How to Plan Strategy and Improve Execution to Achieve Growth. (1st ed. 2021.) (Edition). Palgrave Macmillan..

Updated from original post that was published on 06/25/2021.

What kind of boss do you want? What kind of boss do you want to be? At Rice Business, we believe leaders come in an array of styles, professional roles and personality types. What they share is the ability to bring out the best in coworkers, subordinates and even their superiors. They also display a singular skillset grounded in Rice Business values: empathetic and collaborative leadership. 

It's a distinctive formula, prized by top recruiters because it leads to effective work teams committed to their communities. In the words of Rachael Goydan, managing director of enterprise operations at Deloitte Consulting, "Rice graduates are now an integral part of Deloitte's fabric, making a strong impact through their excellent problem-solving skillset, broad business exposure and collaborative style of working." 

To nurture these skills, Rice Business offers leadership training through academics, such as Professor Jing Zhou's groundbreaking instruction on innovation, with personal coaching at the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, in practice during the Capstone Courses and Action Learning Project, via the Global Field Experience and, finally, through opportunities to lead peers in team experiences and conferences. 

A Consistent Theme in the Rice Business Experience 

"The MBA experience provides a psychologically safe sandbox for students to strengthen themselves and impact their organizations, industries and society at large," said Erica Njoku, director of student experience. "In the entire Rice Business experience, there's a through-line that helps students recognize the importance of making decisions affirming, listening to and valuing a variety of stakeholder groups." 

The impact of this experience is concentrated, thanks to the collaborative community at Rice Business, where students are both colleagues and leaders. The high-achieving student body includes 170+ full-time MBA students, with an average class size is just 40 people and an 8:1 faculty ratio. 

At the same time, Rice's leadership classroom literally is the world. The semester-long Global Field Experience, part of the core curriculum for full-time, professional, executive and online students, creates small teams to work on consulting projects abroad with students, companies and NGOs. 

The goal: fostering durable, productive professional relationships with overseas businesses and colleagues. Integral to this is a service-learning project, more formally known as Creative Practice, designed to forge bonds and deep understanding in the communities in which students may one day do business. During one GFE in Brazil, Rice Business students went so far above and beyond expectations for one struggling client that the business' income rose by 400 percent. 

Building Empathy Close to Home

Rice Business students also contribute closer to home, through the popular Action Learning Project for full-time students, a 13-week, team-based consultative project, in which student teams provide detailed, actionable recommendations for a company facing major challenges, and the Capstone Program, in which second-year student teams from the Professional and Online MBA programs creative comprehensive strategies for nonprofit community organizations and corporate partners. 

Overall, Rice Business ensures that teamwork and an ethic of public service are ingrained in almost everything students do from the beginning of their MBA journey, said Abbey Hartgrove, director of Global Programs and Experiential Learning. 

Rice Business Values at Work

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Julianne Katz (Rice MBA) is a good example of these values at work. As President of the 21st annual Women in Leadership Conference at Rice Business, she took advantage of one of Rice Business' many student leadership opportunities, managing a 15-member committee that worked with 13 corporate and organizational sponsors to launch a high-impact, widely-attended conference during the pandemic. Under Katz's leadership, more than 1,300 attendees, both in Houston and around the globe, heard from more than 45 expert speakers. In addition, Katz was a Rice Business Board Fellow, taking part in a program that engages full-time, professional and executive MBA students as non-voting board members at more than 50 Houston area nonprofits -- again, learning leadership skills while making a difference at the grassroots. 

Access to Professional Quality Leader Development

Rice Business students are also able to access university-wide resources provided by the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, such as one-on-one and group coaching as well as multi-session workshops. The Doerr Institute uses evidence-based practices with an emphasis on measuring impact to develop students cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally to effectively lead themselves, teams and organizations. "The Doerr Institute was the missing piece of the puzzle of my personal development during my Rice MBA journey," said Sujeev Chittipolu (Rice MBA). "The variety of programs at Doerr helped me target and strengthen my skills to become an effective leader. I am seeing improved results at school, at work and, more importantly, at home." 

Quizi (Chu) Liang (Rice MBA) added, "I never had a professional coach before the Rice MBA program and it opened my eyes to a different world of leadership development. Working with the Doerr Institute has helped me gain confidence, convert my weaknesses into strengths and feel proud of myself and my culture." 

Through intensive exploration and reflection, two years of classroom instruction and a smorgasbord of extracurricular and international opportunities, Rice Business conveys a message: leadership is a lifestyle and an ongoing character development process. Few skillsets pay off so well over time, many alumni often say.

"Actively working to make yourself a better leader is not always a comfortable proposition," Herman said. "Becoming a better leader should push you, and -- sometimes -- should feel like a challenge. In addition to the coursework you'll complete in business school, it is important to take advantage of a mix of opportunities that will allow you to shape a bespoke MBA experience, tailored to forge you into the leader you want to become." 
 

Explore the Rice MBA

To boost employees’ creativity, managers should consider offering a set of rewards for them to choose from, according to a new study by management experts at Rice, Tulane University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and National Taiwan Normal University.

The study, co-authored by Jing Zhou, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, is the first to systematically examine the effects of reward choice in a field experiment, which was conducted in the context of an organizationwide suggestion program. An advance copy of the paper is published online in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

“Organizations spend a lot of resources and exert a great deal of effort in designing incentive schemes that reward the employees who exhibit creativity at work,” Zhou said.

“Our results showed that the effort may be a bit misplaced. Instead of discovering one reward type that is particularly effective at promoting creativity, what is more effective is to provide the employees with the opportunity to choose from several reward types, if they submit one or more ideas that are among the top 20% most creative ones.”
 

Workers in the study were given a range of options: a financial reward for the individual employee or their team, a self-discretionary reward such as getting priority to select days off, or a donation the company made to a charity selected by the employee. Those choices had positive, significant effects on the number of creative ideas employees generated and the creativity level of those ideas, Zhou and her co-authors found.

The researchers arrived at their findings by conducting a quasi-experiment at a company in Taiwan over the course of several months. Then they conducted a second experimental study that included employees from 12 organizations in Taiwan to replicate the first study’s results and compared the results with a control group.

The studies also found that rewards aimed at helping others, such as making a donation to a charity, might be especially powerful. But for less-creative employees, alternative rewards that benefit those in need might actually lower creativity and should be avoided, the authors said.

The researchers also found that the choice of rewards fostered creativity by raising the employees’ belief in their ability to be creative. Alternative rewards also had a powerful impact on boosting the creativity of employees who earlier had scored high on an assessment of creative personality characteristics.

Zhou co-authored the paper with Greg Oldham of Tulane, Aichia Chuang of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Ryan Shuwei Hsu of National Taiwan Normal University.

Owl Have You Know

Season 1, Episode 22

This episode is part of a set of short interviews which were recorded during Alumni Reunion Week 2021. Be sure to listen to the other two Alumni Reunion Week episodes. Ian Hernandez ’11 joins host Christine Dobbyn in the Owl's Nest.

Subscribe to Owl Have You Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

The Watt Sells Award

Each year, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) recognizes very top performers on the CPA Exam with the Elijah Watt Sells Award. Watt Sells Award winners must have passed the CPA Exam on their first attempt and have earned an average score above 95.5 across the exam’s four sections.

Nearly 75,000 people sat for the CPA Exam in 2020. Out of those thousands of test-takers, just 89 qualified to earn the prestigious Elijah Watt Sells Award.

Two Award Winners from Rice in 2020

We are exceptionally proud that two members of the Rice MAcc Class of 2020, Emily Rychener and Claire Weddle, earned the Watt Sells Award.

• Emily previously earned her bachelor’s in statistics from Rice in 2019. Emily is currently employed at PwC in Houston.

• Claire, also a “Rice Twice” graduate, earned her bachelor’s in mathematical economic analysis in 2019. She now works at PwC in Stamford, Connecticut.

Well done, Emily and Claire! We applaud you both for this wonderful achievement.

Four Years in a Row!

Emily and Claire’s accomplishment marks the fourth consecutive year that a Rice MAcc alum has won the Watt Sells Award. Our track record is especially noteworthy in light of the purposefully small size of the Rice Master of Accounting program – the MAcc Class of 2020 had just 25 graduates.

Moreover, none of Rice’s Watt Sells Award winners over the past four years had majored in accounting as undergraduates. In just one year, the Rice MAcc provides you the technical accounting and business education needed to excel on the CPA Exam, regardless of what your undergraduate major was.

And Rice’s CPA Exam success doesn’t end with our Watt Sells Award winners. The Rice MAcc program has ranked second highest in the nation on the CPA Exam pass rate for first-time test takers for two years in a row.

To learn more about the Elijah Watt Sells Award and our previous winners, read our blog post: Top CPA Exam Score Winner -- Third Year in a Row!

Find out whether the Rice MAcc program is a good fit for your career goals. Click here for more information about our admissions process. We also encourage you to reach out to us with any questions.

June 17 event will explore Blackness and future freedoms

Rice’s second annual Juneteenth celebration will bring together professors across the university — from Computational and Applied Mathematics to Modern and Classical Literature and Cultures — for three panels exploring ideas and questions central to the meaning and promise of the important holiday.

“Juneteenth and Emancipations to Come” will take place June 17 via Zoom, with an introduction at 8:45 a.m. from Reginald DesRoches, the Howard R. Hughes Provost and professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering. The event will close at 11:30 a.m. with an update from Rice’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice.

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“Juneteenth is a time to reflect on our past and explore how we want to move forward in the future,” DesRoches said. “I believe the university has organized a lecture series that will provide that opportunity to anyone who wants to participate.”

Two additional hourlong sessions will feature presentations from faculty and one recent alum: Dani Perdue ’21. The newly minted mechanical engineering Ph.D. will kick off the first session, “Engineering for Black Lives,” with her talk: “Emancipated, Assimilated and Still Motivated.”

Rice’s most recent Sallyport Award winner and a National GEM Consortium Fellow, Perdue once personally recruited six Black students to Rice during a National Society of Black Engineers national convention. During her time as a graduate student, Perdue founded the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student Association (GSA) and served as the president of the Black GSA as well as the Graduate Student Association’s first vice president of equity and inclusion.

The 9 a.m. “Engineering for Black Lives” panel will also feature Illya Hicks, professor and chair of the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAM), who will discuss “Computational Decision Making for Black Life.” C. Fred Higgs III, vice provost for academic affairs, director of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership and the John and Ann Doerr Professor of Mechanical Engineering, will talk about “Becoming and Producing the Resilient, Tenured, Black R1 Engineering Professor in the 21st Century.”

Fay Yarbrough, associate dean of humanities, professor of history and founding faculty for Rice’s Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) will chair the 9 a.m. “Engineering for Black Lives” session.

The 11:15 a.m. panel “On Blackness and Future Freedoms” begins with a talk from Jacqueline Couti, the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French Studies and founding faculty for Rice’s Center for African and African American Studies, on “Black Culture for Sale in the French Atlantic: Negrophilia Flirting with Negrophobia.”

Assistant professor of sociology Brielle Bryan will speak to “The Racial Wealth Gap: Understanding Driving Factors and the Limits of Current Policy,” and Constance Elise Porter, senior associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion and clinical assistant professor of marketing in the Jones Graduate School of Business, will discuss “Equity in Entrepreneurship and Inclusiveness in Innovative Industries.”

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Alexander Byrd, vice provost for diversity, equity and inclusion and associate professor of history, will chair the 11:15 a.m. session “On Blackness and Future Freedoms.”

Along with Caleb McDaniel, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of History, Byrd will also close the event with an update from the task force, which has posted much of its ongoing work online in the form of webinars and podcast episodes.

Graduate student Adrienne Rooney, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and a co-organizer of Rice’s Racial Geography Project, will chair the final panel.

Now celebrated nationwide, Juneteenth is of particular prominence for Texans. The holiday originated in Galveston and marks the anniversary of General Order No. 3 issued on June 19, 1865, which proclaimed the end of slavery in Texas and the official emancipation of its enslaved people. The original version was unearthed in the United States National Archives just last year.

Juneteenth is also directly responsible for the creation of the first public park in Texas: Houston’s Emancipation Park, which was established in 1872 for the sole purpose of hosting Juneteenth celebrations. After Emancipation Park was donated to the city in 1914, it remained an important public space for the Black community — and a new recreation center, public pool and bathhouse were designed for the park by none other than William Ward Watkin, founder of Rice’s architecture school. This year, the park will host its 149th annual Juneteenth celebration.

The lectures from Rice’s inaugural celebration of the holiday, “Reflections on Juneteenth and America’s Racial Legacy,” were archived by Fondren Library and are now available to view online.

“Juneteenth and Emancipations to Come,” June 17, 8:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m., online. Free. Registration required.

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