How should you select a new CEO?  Loyalty?  Historical management of an existing business?  Understanding of company or industry heritage?  Most of those criteria are rear view focused, even if dominant.  Wouldn't the most important criteria for a new CEO be understanding growth markets and ability to drive growth?

Are you familiar with the acronym BRIC?  It stands for Brazil, Russia, India & China.  Four rapidly growing markets.  If you aren't familiar, you really need to be.  Because your future may well be determined by your ability to compete there – rather than your ability to compete in the USA.  Those markets are growing, and they are rapidly becoming dominant in not only production capability, but in their demand requirements for products as well.  Soon they won't only be places you consider for low cost resources – but places you need to sell if you want to succeed.  The emerging middle class, with money to spend, is rapidly shifting to BRIC countries from the USA and Europe.

According to Crain's Chicago Business, in "Baker & McKenzie Elects New Leader" this $2.1B law firm just selected as its new CEO the head of its Brazilian operations.  Uncharacteristic for most American businesses, yet such an obviously smart move.  Already only 675 of 3,850 company lawyers – less than 20% – are in the USA!  It's a global economy, and Baker & McKenzie are moving where the growth is!

Compare this with McDonald's, which could have put the leader of Chipotle's in charge – but instead sold Chipotles, with its very high growth, and kept putting long-term McDonald's employees in the top job.  Or imagine the difference if GM's Board of Directors had put the head of EDS or Hughes Aircraft, subsidiaries of GM in the 1980s, in the top GM job 25 years ago.  By continuously putting an "auto" executive in the top job GM ended up selling off the high growth subsidiaries, gutted the value out of Saturn, and ended up in bankruptcy court!

There is no more important job for an organization's leader than growth.  Growth can cover a multitude of sins.  Missed sales, lost customers, pricing issues, faulty products — all can be forgotten if you keep driving growth.  Just look at Google's Schmidt and Apple's Jobs.  Hats off to the Management Board at Baker & McKenzie for moving forward and putting the growth market leader into the top job.  More companies should be so unconventional. 

Maybe this will be another Disruption that will help Baker & McKenzie grow even faster than its competitors!  Disrupting the Status Quo is an important part of growth.  Recently Tom Parrish created a podcast interview, published on his EnterpriseLeadershipo.org blog, of us discussing the need to Disrupt in order to grow.  Give it a listen for ideas on using Disruptions to grow in your organization!