About that Swiss Army Knife concept. Friend of S2i.io Isaac Cheifetz recently wrote an article titled How Companies Can Develop “The Hybrid Executive” of Tomorrow with some sharp perspective. Isaac surveys the reality most organizations face and how many roles in the C-suite are essentially outmoded to the compounding challenges they increasingly are experiencing. Invariably, these challenges involve digital, technology, data and the surge of artificial intelligence. This reality also includes the need to de-silo these roles and understand that competitive advantages in data, tech stacks, analysis and customer experience are better actualized by leaders with blended experiences and perspectives. But much like the advent of the internet and all of the digital jobs it created some time ago, there is no career track to develop these hybrid executives, these Swiss Army Knives. They have to pursue this blended experience themselves out of passion, curiosity and strong intuition, and typically by taking on a diversity of roles in a range of different types of organizations. These people are not, and cannot be corporate lifers. This makes them immensely valuable to organizations, which also makes them incredibly hard to locate and recruit effectively. There is a generational shift happening in C-suite leadership across all kinds of companies as a generation retires and younger leadership takes the helm. The good news is that there is likely a high percentage of this new leadership that came into these roles by creating a custom career path for themselves that essentially hybridized them. They did that on their own in environments and company cultures that did not necessarily encourage or support those efforts. They pursued this path because they saw the future and knew that their future demanded it.

We are entering a new phase where the companies that embrace and support these types of hybridized roles and that put in place the culture to nurture them will be the ones that win because they will be able to move smarter, faster and more successfully than their competition.