From HR as usual to pursuing change: The people pendulum is swinging again and after fluctuating in importance for over a decade, this year the focus on talent has risen sharply across the C-suite.

CEOs, especially, are paying close attention—65 percent expect that people skills will have a strong impact on their businesses over the next several years, and will prompt the creation of new strategies.

For CHROs, this means the heat is on. Yet our research shows that only 28 percent expect their enterprise to address changing workforce demographics with new strategies. As organizations strive for entirely new business models—collaborating with partners across highly orchestrated ecosystems or digital platforms—it’s time for HR to take bold steps to foster reinvention and ensure talent flourishes across the enterprise.

A broader context

Perspective from the Global C-suite Study

Two decades after the Internet became a platform for transformation, we’re still wondering how it all might turn out. The signals aren’t always clear. Today, winner-take-all organizations are on the rise, but collaborative ecosystems are flourishing as well. Even in industries where competitive concentration is increasing, innovation hasn’t—as would be expected—flatlined. Which way to the future?

The organizations that are prospering aren’t lying in wait to time the next inflection point: the moment when a new technology, business model or means of production really takes off. Remaking the enterprise, they recognize, isn’t a matter of timing but of continuity. What’s required, now more than ever, is the resilience for perpetual reinvention.

It’s a matter of seeking and championing change even when the status quo happens to be working quite well. To put the HR story into context, it’s important to look at the new business landscape. Four macro trends have emerged: market incumbents are rising, personalization is taking off, platforms are disrupting industries, and agile methods are driving innovation.

Drawing from the responses to a survey of executives across the C-suite, IBM client engagements and our work with academics, the 19th edition of the IBM Global C-suite Study, “Incumbents Strike Back,” explores these four topics that describe the changing business landscape.

Read the full study here.

The IBM Institute for Business Value, in cooperation with Oxford Economics, interviewed 2,139 Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs). In 179 face-toface and 1,960 phone interviews, both quantitative and qualitative responses were collected. The analytical basis for this CHRO report uses 2,080 valid responses from the total data sample collected. More than 12,800 CxOs, representing six C-suite roles, 20 industries and 112 countries, contributed to our latest research. We used the IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier to analyze their contextual responses and ascertain overarching themes. We also used various statistical methods, including cluster analysis and discriminant analysis, to scrutinize the millions of data points we collected.