The Chief Thought Officer: The Missing Chief

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business.” 

~ Warren Buffett

So here is the most successful investor of the 20^th century; a “sage” who has consistently ranked amongst the world’s wealthiest people (he was ranked as the world’s wealthiest person in 2008) insisting on the uncommon exercise of thinking.

“Thinking is the hardest work there is"

At ClickTell Consulting, through our work with companies large or small, in the West or the East, we have identified the root cause of most problems facing corporations of today to be a lack of critical and timely thinking. Lack of thinking and the ensuing uninformed decision making is ultimately a major contributor to corporation funerals or near death incidents.

Indeed as Henry Ford put it; “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.” However, our observations show that, even in the case of CEOs and senior managers fully conversant with the practice of thinking there is another problem. They often find it simply impossible to be dealing with the day to day issues of running a corporation at the same time as finding the time to think. What they need is a “thinking buddy” in the form of a Chief Thought Officer (CTO).

Business is all about continuously developing strategies that have a greater chance of success. Since identifying the need for CTOs and coining the term Chief Thought Officer, we have seen a vibrant demand for our insight in this field. Acting as our clients’ CTO we support them to out-think, out-plan and out-manoeuvre competitors and other forces.

What do you think?

Dr Sepe Sehati, Co-founder, ClickTell Consulting