July 17, 2014

Poll: Which breed of CI leader are you?

By Paul Laughlin

Colourful BullIf you watch the actions and listen to the language used by most CEOs, especially where they choose to focus their time, you can often guess their background. What I mean is their functional leadership background, whether that be finance, marketing, operations, sales, etc. This, of course, is only natural and probably reveals their area of greatest interest or where they feel most comfortable. As a leader we can all have the tendency to spend a little too much time in our comfort zone or pet projects.

This got me to thinking, does such a bias affect customer insight leaders? Do leaders with a background in IT, Data or MI lead their whole team differently than those with Analytical backgrounds in Finance or Research or Marketing backgrounds? It is an interesting question and a potential blind spot for leaders.

So, I thought I’d start by gathering some data through a quick poll. Apologies if the categories don’t work for you first time, I’ll refresh this as I get more qualitative feedback…