Section 1: CEO Challenges and Issues
The first section of the questionnaire deals with several general issues raised during the qualitative data gathering process. In the first question, respondents are asked to rate the importance of eleven issues on a seven point scale ranging from “not important” to “very important” (Figure 1).
1. Please rate the following issues in terms of their importance to you and your company.
Eight of the issues are rated as being very important by the majority of respondents, with “corporate reputation” and “customer loyalty and retention” having the highest mean responses.
The three remaining issues appear near the middle of the importance scale: “natural resources prices,” “keeping pace with global competition,” and “growing the business internationally.” However, the “natural resources prices” pattern of responses differs significantly from that of the two global issues. Respondents are spread out evenly across the importance scale for “natural resources prices,” indicating a broad range of opinions about this issue. We would expect that these responses are closely related to the relative magnitude of energy usage across industry categories. The pattern of responses to the two global issues is clearly bi-modal, meaning that relatively large numbers of executives view the issue as being either very important or not important, with relatively few responding in the middle of the scale.
Preliminary analysis reveals that larger companies are more concerned about global issues than are smaller companies, that companies outside central Indiana are more concerned than companies in central Indiana, and that more highly educated executives are more concerned than are less highly educated executives.
The second question of this section asks about an organization’s likelihood of pursuing several possible activities during the next 18 months (Figure 2).
2. Please rate how likely your company is to pursue each of the following in the next 18 months.
Among these nine potential activities, “adding jobs” has the highest average score and also has the largest number responding with a “7” (“definitely will pursue”). In fact, over half the respondents (55%), indicated they are likely to pursue adding jobs by responding with a “5,” “6,” or “7.” Only 26% of respondents indicate they will likely not add jobs by responding with a “1,” “2,” or “3.”
Interestingly, “succession planning” has the second highest average response, again with 55% indicating at least some likelihood of engaging in this activity.
Among those activities least likely to be pursued are, “alternative energy sources,” “reducing jobs,” and “relocating outside Indiana.” Indeed, only 8% indicate any likelihood of relocating outside Indiana, 11% indicate a likelihood of reducing jobs, and 16% indicate a likelihood of pursing alternative energy sources.
A question for further analysis relates to the relationships among “adding jobs,” “outsourcing,” “reducing jobs,” and “relocating outside Indiana.” Preliminary evidence appears to be counterintuitive: “adding jobs” has a small but statistically significant positive relationship with both “outsourcing” and “relocation.”
The news that companies are likely to add jobs is tempered by the evidence that some of these jobs are probably to be added elsewhere and/or contracted out to other firms. On the other hand, “reducing jobs” does not appear to be significantly related to either “outsourcing” or “relocating outside Indiana.”
The final question of this section asked about “how challenging” each of several issues are to executives and/or their firms (Figure 3).
3. Please indicate how challenging you or your company finds each of the following:
“Having enough time” has the highest average response, with 45% indicating this issue is “extremely challenging.” The next four issues – “rising customer expectations,” “keeping up with technology,” “customer retention and loyalty,” and “human resources” – all receive average responses around “5” on our 7-point scale. These issues are all considered challenging by our respondents, with relatively few responding near the bottom of the scale for any of these issues.
Although “rising shareholder expectations” receive significant press coverage in general, that issue is not considered very challenging by respondents to this survey. The reason the issue is rated so low in this study may be because shareholder expectations are not perceived as rising by our respondents, or because our respondents feel they are able to respond to those rising expectations, or for of some other reason.
Finally, “foreign competition” once again appears not to be a major concern of our respondents. As one might expect, there is a high and significant correlation between this issue in question #3 and the two related issues (“growing the business internationally” and “keeping pace with global competition”) in question #1.
