Course Preview | Chief Operating Officer (COO) Program from MIT xPRO
9:59 min
44
So welcome to MIT Chief Operating Officer program. My name is David Nino and I'll be your academic advisor for this program. So just to start off, why focus on the COO role?
So just as a little bit of history that we know that the role evolved around the 1960s as part of the senior executive team that's responsible for the whole organization, what today's called the C suite because of their chief titles. And as the title suggests, this role is very functional in purpose, which means that it is it is involving managing and leading an entire company 's operations. Not all companies have Coos, but in today's fast changing and and increasingly complex environments, the role of the COO has become much more common, as in contemporary organizations as part of the C suite teams. And So what are the, what are the roles and responsibilities of the COO? Well, companies actually we're, we're learning from research, from emerging research that companies designed these roles to suit their specific needs. So there's really no universal job description or definition that's, that involves what a COO entails.
However, we know that these roles tend to focus on overseeing manufacturing products, R&D, sales, many of those activities and functions in an in an organization that comprise or what I would call kind of the technical core. We also know from research that a central part of the COO role is to develop and execute corporate strategy. This is organization wide strategy. Many analysts refer to the COO as a highly, highly internal focus. So they partner up with the COO who is more external focus, which focuses on external stakeholders and being sort of the public face of the organization. And so the, the COO is often seen as the person that kind of runs the organization and the and, and, and the organization 's operations. However, I personally think that today, because so many supply chains and production systems are global in nature, I think that referring the to the CEO as a as a highly internal role really falls short of a true description of what the COO does. There's a lot of external stakeholder engagement that's involved in the role, and I think opportunities come from that as well in terms of finding new ideas and innovations in the marketplace.
There's a book published recently by Nathan Bennett and Steven Miles, and the book is called Writing Shotgun. And as the title suggests, this is the, this is a Co, the, the emphasis of the book is really on the, what's the role of the chief operating officer as it relates to the Co CEO, which is a chief executive officer. There's 5 relevant sort of perspectives here. I call them capabilities that are central to be an effective COO. And the first is obviously focused on complex operations. And so here, the core capability, I think is on how to execute and deliver the strategic results that are needed by the organization and stakeholders. The second I, I think is if you look at the strategic imperatives that are coming out of a company, adapting new innovations and responding to competitive moves in the marketplace, there's this focus on, on change agentry and the capability of the COO and implementing innovation and change. A 3rd capability I think we see from research on the COO role involves the COO essentially coaching and mentoring a CEO of a young organization that's growing quickly and scaling quickly.
So the idea here is that as the complexity of the organization rises, you need somebody with much more experience sort of helping an organization grow to its next level. This is an important function of the COO. Again, in some organizations, a 3rd role that I mean a 4th role that we see from research is how this Chief Operating Officer complements some of the strengths of the CEO. Like for example, if an, if you have an engineering company and a CEO that has that sort of comes up through the ranks of marketing or even finance, the COO might have strong capability in engineering. And this is a way that both of these these members of the senior executive team can complement one another. And so the capability here is how do you become a trusted partner with the CEO related to that. And I think this is again, the implication of the of the of the title of this book is the COO is essentially the number 2 of the organization. So it's a way of organizing large, complex companies that are it's essentially a Co leadership role.
So just as a little bit of history that we know that the role evolved around the 1960s as part of the senior executive team that's responsible for the whole organization, what today's called the C suite because of their chief titles. And as the title suggests, this role is very functional in purpose, which means that it is it is involving managing and leading an entire company 's operations. Not all companies have Coos, but in today's fast changing and and increasingly complex environments, the role of the COO has become much more common, as in contemporary organizations as part of the C suite teams. And So what are the, what are the roles and responsibilities of the COO? Well, companies actually we're, we're learning from research, from emerging research that companies designed these roles to suit their specific needs. So there's really no universal job description or definition that's, that involves what a COO entails.
However, we know that these roles tend to focus on overseeing manufacturing products, R&D, sales, many of those activities and functions in an in an organization that comprise or what I would call kind of the technical core. We also know from research that a central part of the COO role is to develop and execute corporate strategy. This is organization wide strategy. Many analysts refer to the COO as a highly, highly internal focus. So they partner up with the COO who is more external focus, which focuses on external stakeholders and being sort of the public face of the organization. And so the, the COO is often seen as the person that kind of runs the organization and the and, and, and the organization 's operations. However, I personally think that today, because so many supply chains and production systems are global in nature, I think that referring the to the CEO as a as a highly internal role really falls short of a true description of what the COO does. There's a lot of external stakeholder engagement that's involved in the role, and I think opportunities come from that as well in terms of finding new ideas and innovations in the marketplace.
There's a book published recently by Nathan Bennett and Steven Miles, and the book is called Writing Shotgun. And as the title suggests, this is the, this is a Co, the, the emphasis of the book is really on the, what's the role of the chief operating officer as it relates to the Co CEO, which is a chief executive officer. There's 5 relevant sort of perspectives here. I call them capabilities that are central to be an effective COO. And the first is obviously focused on complex operations. And so here, the core capability, I think is on how to execute and deliver the strategic results that are needed by the organization and stakeholders. The second I, I think is if you look at the strategic imperatives that are coming out of a company, adapting new innovations and responding to competitive moves in the marketplace, there's this focus on, on change agentry and the capability of the COO and implementing innovation and change. A 3rd capability I think we see from research on the COO role involves the COO essentially coaching and mentoring a CEO of a young organization that's growing quickly and scaling quickly.
So the idea here is that as the complexity of the organization rises, you need somebody with much more experience sort of helping an organization grow to its next level. This is an important function of the COO. Again, in some organizations, a 3rd role that I mean a 4th role that we see from research is how this Chief Operating Officer complements some of the strengths of the CEO. Like for example, if an, if you have an engineering company and a CEO that has that sort of comes up through the ranks of marketing or even finance, the COO might have strong capability in engineering. And this is a way that both of these these members of the senior executive team can complement one another. And so the capability here is how do you become a trusted partner with the CEO related to that. And I think this is again, the implication of the of the of the title of this book is the COO is essentially the number 2 of the organization. So it's a way of organizing large, complex companies that are it's essentially a Co leadership role.
