I was leafing through the latest copy of Harvard Business Review, when a two page IBM ad caught my eye.  It was entitled ‘2.2224 trillion dollars.  The Combined Revenue of the 1,130 CEOs surveyed in the 2008 Global CEO Study.’ It included the url for downloading (IBM.COM/DOING/CEOSTUDY and I found it fascinating and worth reviewing for all of us involved in looking into the future of the enterprise and what may be the most critical components of a successful business.

The Survey Pool

This study is the third edition of IBM’s  biennial Global CEO Study series. This year’s research is based on surveys of 1,130 CEO s, general managers and senior public sector and business leaders from around the world.1 IBM leaders conducted more than 95 percent of these interviews face to face.  The Economist Intelligence Unit administered the remainder by telephone.
 

Executive Summary

What will the Enterprise of the Future look like? To answer that question, IBM  spoke with more than 1,000 CEO s from around the world. These conversations, together with the statistical and financial analyses, provide a unique perspective on the future of the enterprise.  CEO s are rapidly positioning their businesses to capture the growth opportunities they see. The discussions about their plans and challenges revealed several striking findings:

Organizations are bombarded by change, and many are struggling to keep up. Eight out of ten CEO s see significant change ahead, and yet the gap between expected change and the ability to manage it has almost tripled since IBM’s  last Global CEO Study in 2006. CEO s view more demanding customers not as a threat, but as an opportunity to differentiate. CEO s are spending more to attract and retain increasingly prosperous, informed and socially aware customers. Nearly all CEO s are adapting their business  models — two-thirds are implementing extensive innovations. More than 40 percent are changing their enterprise models to be more collaborative.

CEO s are moving aggressively toward global business designs, deeply changing capabilities and partnering more extensively. CEO s have moved beyond the cliché of globalization, and organizations of all sizes are reconfiguring to take advantage of global integration opportunities. Financial ‘outperformers’ are making bolder plays. These companies anticipate more change, and manage it better. They are also more global in their business designs, partner more extensively and choose more disruptive forms of business model innovation.

Relevance to CRE and FM

What does this mean to corporate real estate and facility management professionals you might ask?  I think that it means the following:

• Since change is going to accelerate, now more than ever, we need a thorough accurate snapshot of what we have in our real estate portfolios, where it is, what it consists of and how is it utilized today.  Only with this accurate baseline information, can we begin to play the kind of ‘what if’ scenarios we will need to model when those changes become clearer. 

• We need to make sure that we have a flexible way of organizing the structure of the business in our real estate databases since it is more than likely that the enterprise models will be changing, which means so will the organizational structures.  We must have the ability to make whatever changes are needed quickly.

• We may only have real estate domestically today, but we need to make sure that the information we need to store in our databases can be easily adapted to any location in the world when our organization begins “to take advantage of global integration opportunities”.

These are just a few concepts I thought of as I read the report, but I would love to hear of your ideas after you have read it.