From time-to-time, we have covered the importance of creativity in the corporate arena, recently, we discovered the fascinating results of IBM's last Global CEO Study.

According to the 1,541 CEOs, general managers, and senior public sector leaders around the world polled, creativity is the number one leadership competency going forward. Top talent practices and encourages experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations.

Interestingly, the reason for this finding is the increasing uncertainty and complexity in the New Normal. The future has become a lot less predictable and CEOs believe that creative geniuses will have the greatest levels of success.

This new kind of creative leaders will be capable of tweaking systems to come up with new answers on how you run, organize, and develop the business. In fact, creative leaders will have to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they will have to take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

Today's complexity will rise, and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, with outstanding leadership, some organizations have turned this increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.

The most successful organizations will collaborate with customers and other stakeholders to co-create products and services, and integrate customers into core processes. They are establishing new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs will make customer intimacy their number-one priority. Moreover, they expected talented leaders to enjoy 20 percent more future revenue from new sources.

Continuous Strategic Planning will be an ongoing process, rather than an annual on, so that the organization may respond to fast changing market conditions.

Finally, the top "people strategy" is figuring out how to incorporate "non-financial" rewards into the mix to motivate staff, a concept we, as consultants, have long advocated. Other people strategies they deemed important are deploying more staff internationally and working with government/educational systems to improve the talent pool.

© Copyright 1998-2011 by The Herman Group of Companies, Inc., all rights reserved.  From 'The Herman Trend Alert,' by Joyce Gioia, Strategic Business Futurist. (800) 227-3566 or www.hermangroup.com.

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