Critical Success Factors for Executives in Global Economy

Background

The objective of management, especially in global economy is repetitive success. This is also the expectation from executives. Hence, it does little good if executives are considered successful but do not know why they were successful and do not know how to repeat their successes. Success that is the result of luck is not really success. Hence there is a need to identify and understand the factors which are critical in making the executives successful repeatedly. But, with phrases like Critical Success Factors and Executives having ‘common usage’ within technical environments it is difficult to identify the true history in the context of business, management and human resources. Spencer (1955) asks the question: “What are the essential factors that produce success in my company?” which for 1955 is getting close to the beginnings of CSFs – so for those interested in the early beginnings is worth a look. Predating these pieces is a short entry by Lebreton (1957, p. 103) “the factors which seem to be paramount in determining success in this industry” this is by far the earliest mention of what is today known as “Critical Success factors”. Ronald (1961), does not use the term CSF or even the phrase Critical Success factors, but does discuss critical elements and non-critical elements of a business leading to “controlling competitive success”. He also uses the term “success factors” in the context that we would understand today. One test for originality is the use of the TLA (Three Letter Acronym) of CSF (Rockart, 1979). To our mind the first published work of this approach is by Rockart.

There are four basic types of critical success factors (CSF’s). They are: