Is 'industry experience' essential?

When I was an executive recruiter, one of the client briefing comments that would throw me was 'The right person will have industry experience.' It still amazes me. Because I still see the same error perpetuated across decades. 

Your industry is not that special. The technology, the people, the competition are all unique, but they have the same shape as any industry. Recruiting within that constraint perpetuates the same way of thinking, right up to the day another industry makes your entire industry irrelevant. This happens. 

Conversely, if you are and experienced professional looking for an interesting next career step, hitting the 'not raised here' brick wall attitude can be frustrating. 

There are benefits to a cross-industry hire

Recruiting outside your industry, apart from making you think a bit harder about what you're trying to achieve as an organisation, has a number of benefits if done well. 

• End group think. 
• Find new differentiation.
• Innovate successfully. 
• Enliven your talented people. 
• Increase market share. 
• Enter adjacencies successfully. 

Where to start

What's the pivotal idea that makes a cross industry person useful?

It's the issues map.

At any time an organisation faces a set of issues of which a few are existential, that is, they determine the survival of the organisation on the strategic timeframe. These issues may be shared by the whole industry, sparked by technology changes, legislation, weather events, or other big shifts. Typically, the industry will address these issues with approaches (and reflexes) that fall within a narrow band. This is usually more obvious to 'outsiders' than 'insiders', for whom small differences from the immediate competition can feel big. So the whole industry goes down a similar path.

An alternative way out is to map what the issues mean for the organisation and which few are truly critical.

• Do standards need to lift?
• Do you need a new vision?
• Do you need to do more and differently with the same people?
• Do you need to innovate on the business model, the culture, the delivery channels, the customer focus, the talent development process?
• Which three (only) are the key?

Recruiting for issues experience is at least as powerful as recruiting for industry experience. Industries go through challenges in cycles. People in one industry often deal with a set of issues 3-5 years ahead of other industries. In other words there are people out there who have seen it before and survived. They know what to do better than you. 

Hiring well

Matching your key hires to the key issues means being extremely clear, in depth, about your issues and the talents an individual needs to possess to address them successfully, particularly in the CEO role. It means not being sidetracked by surface factors - they may even dress weirdly for your industry, but conservatively for theirs. 

If they have issues experience, they might, just might, be effective. However, can they adapt? 

What are the factors that make 'industry experience' valuable? Some are: 

• Understanding how the technology drives the products, marketing and finances of the industry.
• Relationships of trust and close cooperation developed over decades. 
• History of what has worked and what has not - the reason for the 'special' counterintuitive knowledge that's so valued. 

So can a new entrant to the industry overcome ignorance of this? 

• Industries, like languages, are learnable. Can they learn fast? Hire the quick learner.
• Relationships can be cemented quickly. Do they have this talent? Hire the trusted advisor.
• Advice can become 'snow', the blizzard of irrelevance. Do they know how to filter complex advice? Hire for IQ plus EQ.

These talents, in addition to the issues experience, can enable a strong executive from one industry adapt swiftly and effectively to another and dodge the existential bullet. 

There are consequences

Usually, this will mean the board, and other executives have to ride the tiger of:

• In-depth innovation as a set of processes that will dismantle and reassemble some very precious organisational habits, from board meetings to sales pitches. 
• Successful, calculated but terrifying risk taking that can feel like the black run at a ski resort, to one who normally sits in the back of a limousine. 
• Renewed resilience in the face of the big issues, but with organisational stress, in revised quality and performance standards, different reporting structures (with disrupted social structures), and new codes of conduct (that reflect new values).

It's the board's job to know all this, to work it through and adopt a recruitment strategy for the CEO that takes it into account. Done well, it can transform the organisation and shift it into a new long-term growth cycle. Not done, the board is happily committed to the old stagnant cycle. 

Your career

As an executive, this is the basis for your case, your 'pitch' for a cross-industry move. Not to be undertaken lightly, of course, as one of my clients discovered this morning. But just as a cross-industry hire can transform an organisation, a cross-industry move can propel a career into a new level.