Challenges for CEOs in 2014

Corporate leaders are going back to basics in 2014, positioning themselves for growth after a long post-crisis period of restructuring, according to a survey from the US-based Conference Board.

The business organisation’s annual CEO Challenge study cites executives’ top four priorities as human capital, customer relationships, innovation and operational excellence. But the most striking trend in the past three years is the increasing priority leaders are giving to cultivating customers.

Explore the key challenges cited by CEOs, globally or by region, and how executives’ priorities have changed over the past four years, in this interactive graphic.

Methodology

The survey is based on responses from 1,020 CEOs, presidents and chairmen to The Conference Board CEO Challenge survey, distributed between September and October 2013. Respondents were asked to rank their top five challenges from a list of 10. Each challenge was assigned a weight: if a particular challenge was ranked one, it was given a weight of five, a number two rank was given a weight of four, and a ranking of number three was given a weight of three, and so forth through the top five.

Each weighted score was then assigned an additional weight based on the share of respondent’s country GDP as a proportion of all countries represented in the survey sample relative to the share of that country’s respondents in the total of 1,020 responses. For more details, read the full report