The Diversity of the CEO: All Types

With the growth and evolution of technology, the CEOs of rising companies are growing and evolving, too. In a twist, these CEOs may not be what you typically expect of C-Suite executives. The demographics have been and are continuing to change. Take a look at some of the new and emerging CEOs to see how diverse they are and are becoming.

The Young

Shubham Banerjee is the founder of Braigo Labs, Inc., a start-up company that resulted from a young boy’s science fair project and curiosity about how blind people read. 13-year old Shubham was surprised at how expensive the Brail readers were and set-out to make a less expensive prototype for his project. He used legos and supplies from a hardware shop andlater presented this new product to the Intel Capital Summit. Braigo is one of 16 companies Intel selected to invest in.

The Experienced

John Thompson is the former and retired CEO of Symantec. After spending his last 10 years at Symantec, Thompson expected to retire in comfort and quiet. However, that’s not quite how things turned out. He is now 65 years old and the CEO of Virtual Instruments. Virtual Instruments is one of Thompson’s start-up investments. While the majority of CEOs are heading into retirement to enjoy their nest egg, Thompson is starting a new venture all over again. According to his interview with Business Insider, Thompson claims he is still able-bodied and wants to stay engaged rather than spend his next 20 or so years sitting around bored.

Women

Women CEOs are the wave of the future. All you have to do is look at the staggering number of women going on to earn their executive MBA to realize this. According to a recent report by the publication Strategy&, by the year 2040, 30% of CEOs are going to be women. Add to this the CNN list of the top performing CEOs in America to include Maggie Wilderotter from Frontier Communications, Phebe Novakovic from General Dynamics, Indra Nooyi from PepsiCo, Ursula Burns
from Xerox, and Marillyn Hewson from Lockheed Martin, and it’s clear to see that more and more women are being represented in the field of CEOs.

The Position

Strategy also predicts that a new C-Suite role is going to evolve in the future — the role of Chief Resource Officer (CRO). While the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is responsible for the financial matters of the company, the CRO is going to be responsible for all of the other resources the company needs to operate, such as insurance, information security, compliance with all current regulations and laws, and so on. As the environment changes and resources become scarcer, CROs working for energy, utility, and transportation companies are going to have to be savvier than ever in how they obtain resources such as clean air, water, and fossil fuels for their company to run most efficiently.

With so many changes in the way we do business, the look, backgrounds, and educations of CEOs are already starting to evolve — and this trend is expected to continue well into the future.