InformationWeek

September 14, 1998

Executive Report: Leadership And Innovation By Example

By Charles Pelton

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ow do you define leadership? For the men and women who have been named InformationWeek's Chief of the Year, leadership is synonymous with the effective delivery and practice of innovation.

Take the four industries represented by the four former Chiefs of the Year who appear together this week at the annual InformationWeek Conference: finance, retail, chemicals, and office products/technology. In each case, the executive continues to be called upon to lead change within his or her organization and industry.

Denis O'Leary, now executive VP of consumer products and services at Chase Manhattan Corp. and Chief of the Year in 1996, works in an industry which at its core is unchanged from the days of the Medicis. The banking industry will never become obsolete, but the nature of marketing financial services and the avenues of distribution for financial products today are driven by technology innovation more than by any other force.

For Cinda Hallman, now global VP of integrated processes and systems at DuPont, innovation cannot be separated from creativity. "These things aren't separate," says Hallman, 1995 Chief of the Year. "It starts with understanding where you're trying to go." DuPont is aggressively shifting its business model to embrace products that derive from or are created through life sciences. More than anything, this transformation relies on knowledge-information-vs. physical assets or materials. The challenge at DuPont, or any company that needs to sharpen its focus, is to transform the way people think about their work.

At Wal-Mart, home of 1997 Chief of the Year Randy Mott, innovation is defined through a willingness to experiment. Wal-Mart will test a new technology even before a formal price/perfor-

mance case is made. The retailer won't over-study things as long as the business can support the concept. Mott doesn't know, for instance, if electronic shelf labels or customer self-checkout will work. "It may be ahead of its time," says Mott, who serves as this year's Conference host. But his gut tells him that he needs to try these new technology-driven strategies in a few Wal-Mart stores, even if they aren't tactically appropriate for today.

At Xerox, leadership and innovation mean sitting at the table as the entire company shifts its product and customer base. In the late 1980s, the Stamford, Conn., manufacturer sold copiers into the office-supply market. Now, Xerox has been reinvented to become a networked digital systems company that sells, in part, into the IT organization. For VP and CIO Patricia Wallington, the 1992 Chief of the Year who has announced her intention to retire by year's end, that meant tackling organizational and cultural change.

Whether it's using IT to develop new forms of distribution or to help the organization change its product and marketplace focus, these four leaders have taken the concept of innovation and used it to fuel change. The lesson shouldn't be lost on any IT leader in any industry. Every player in the modern economy is under immense pressure to evolve and change. Wallington describes this attitude simply when she says, "One of the jobs of the CIO is to anticipate what's coming next and prepare the organization."

Charles Pelton is editor-in-chief/events.

"Executive Report: IT Innovators"

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