Chief Leadership Officer®* (CLO®) is a philosophy and a highly developed, yet open source-style approach to doing business that invites innovation and participation. The CLO Integrity Map provides a frame to reform business with purpose rightfully leading the strategy and people to increase wealth so everyone profits.
Chief Leadership Officer is the inspiration for the CLO Foundry, a community of aspiring and actual business leaders seeking to co-create a more complete manner of being in business. We use words like purpose, profit, and wealth in their truest and most robust meanings. We understand and live into the real reasons why business exists.
The CLO mindset and method looks into the future and draws on the past to guide how we act in the present. Being a CLO shares the CEO heritage, yet it is distinctively different from the nearly universal Chief Executive Officer operating system. The CEO-system has produced significant material gains and societal advancement. For too long, however, it has been objectifying people by reducing them to units of production, aka Human Resources. For generations, this deficit in decency was widely accepted by all the players as the sacrificial price of progress and profit. The formation of labor unions and laws curbed abuses, yet the pursuit of financial gain at the expense of people remains the erroneous central and dark rationale for business.
We’re doing business incompletely right. Profit without purpose is ultimately an under performing pursuit riddled with costly, yet avoidable, inefficiencies that depress financial results. It’s crazy, but so universally accepted that few think twice about doing business differently.
New Times Call for New Leadership.
A relatively safe and prospering society at work in the Digital Age has ample and affordable accessibility to information and education. New frontiers of opportunity emerge daily. Talented people have far more choices today than ever before and far greater insights into their work and quality of life.
Enter Chief Leadership Officer, a top officer leadership approach focusing on leading people and organizations into a more cohesive venture that profitably produces goods and services while increasing wealth so everyone profits. By one measure, CLO is the difference between enriching shareholders (CEO) versus increasing wealth for stakeholders (CLO).
CLOs acknowledge and value the production efficiencies and execution talent of their CEO predecessors. This remains an essential aspect for a company to be a leader in its chosen field. CLO also see CEOs as passe’ remnants of the Industrial Age mindset; they’re the last, yet most powerful, holdouts from organizational innovation. For this reason and many others, those who approach being in business with the CLO mindset and methods are forerunners of a long overdue business reformation. We gather together at the CLO Foundry, a leadership development community, to transition from CEO-to-CLO.
Welcome to CLO: Business Reformed! Ready to make the CEO-to-CLO shift? Reach out to On-Purpose Partners for our consulting or coaching services at info@on-purpose.com or call 407.657.6000. In the meantime, here’s next step suggestions to get started on your CEO-to-CLO journey.