Leadership in the Information Age

A great article with this same title by Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, in “The World in 2010,” published by The Economist, discusses how business leadership has been forced to evolve to keep up with the overwhelming abundance of real-time information made available by the internet.

As Bartz states, “the deluge of information is only going to rise. Leadership will increasingly mean leveraging that information, clarifying it, and using it to advance your strategy, engage customers and motivate employees.”

At OpenView, we constantly encourage the expansion stage technology companies in our portfolio to sift through the noise and identify those pieces of information and data that are key to measuring the success of their strategy. The CFO can, and should, play a key role in assisting their management team in identifying and interpreting these datapoints. To do this most effectively, the CFO must understand the business, and build relationships with business managers throughout their organization in order to build this understanding. Only then can the CFO accurately identify those pieces of data and non-financial information that are most meaningful and insightful to optimizing their company’s strategy.