Last week I discussed the concept of implying too much precision in a business model. I also see a similar error when people plan their careers. Often they analyze and study every possible nuance of a new job or career decision when they would be better served by simplifying the decision. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recently […]
The quest to know all the answers down to the last decimal place sometimes gives people a false sense of surety. My dad – who taught engineering at Louisiana Tech University – was one of those university professors who students feared. This was partly because he often took points off students’ papers for things they […]
Your Optimism Might Be Stifling Your Team
This is a great article in Harvard Business Review about how unbridled optimism can be detrimental to employees. Especially for a CEO, being too optimistic can make employees think you don’t understand their challenges, you are being dishonest, and/or that you don’t have a grasp on reality. I covered the drawbacks of a CEO who is too optimistic in my Cheerleader CEO Fail post.
Here is an interesting infographic Salesforce.com published on its blog about How to Motivate Your Employees, with the main message that money is not the top motivator. This is a topic I’ll keep covering along with employee engagement, because they are integral to ensuring high performance in companies. Late last year I discussed Daniel Pink’s outstanding TED presentation on The Puzzle of Motivation, which goes into more detail about how intrinsic motivators are more effective than extrinsic ones. I highly recommend his book also: Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us
Registration is now open for RISE Week Austin, named one of the “Must-Attend 2013 Conferences for Entrepreneurs” by a Forbes contributor. Taking place May 13-17, the event ”offers entrepreneurs a combination of interactive learning sessions, inspiring keynotes, unique competitions, funding opportunities, and celebratory networking events.” I’ll be hosting a session on Thursday, May 16 called “10 Steps to a 9-Figure+ Exit.” Sessions are kept to only 25 people to allow for in-depth, quality interactions, so sign up soon!
http://www.texasenterprise.utexas.edu/article/how-ceos-social-life-affects-company-performance
The answer is yes, and it’s more than anecdotal. Texas Enterprise shares the business and public policy knowledge created at The University of Texas at Austin and published an article recently detailing the research of assistant professor Cesare Fracassi, who studies executives’ social networks. He recently finished a nine-year study comparing the social ties between 30,860 executives at 2,059 companies to decisions those companies made, especially investment patterns. His conclusion in a nutshell:
“There is evidence that suggests that where the CEO and directors are more socially involved, the company is more profitable,” Fracassi says. “The information they receive helps the company to make the right decisions.”
Read the full article at TexasEnterprise.com
A recent headline in Bloomberg declared CA’s New CEO Jolting Old Guard With Silicon Valley Moxie. As someone who founded a company acquired by CA Technologies, I am very interested to see what changes new CEO Mike Gregoire will introduce there. After spending six months on the inside of CA, I was impressed with the […]
I often use sports analogies in my writing and teaching, and an article by Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project – fittingly titled The 6 Keys To Being Awesome At Everything – caught my eye as both a tennis player and a CEO veteran. Because performance in sports is so easily measured, we have made […]
I have just become a Forbes contributor and my site is aptly named The American CEO, where I give “practical advice for current and aspiring CEOs” much like I do in this blog. In my first article I write about why CEOs need to own their recruiting functions and provide 10 rules for how to manage them. I also recommend five tangible metrics for monitoring the performance of your recruiting organization, which have worked well for me. I invite you to visit my site and follow it as well as share my articles if you find them worthy. I’ll continue to post here regularly as well.
We want people to join Starbucks who have like-minded values. We need happy people—we’re a people company that serves coffee, not the other way around…If you don’t believe we can do this, or you don’t believe in me, this isn’t going to work—we’re going to have to have a private conversation. Howard Schultz, chairman and […]
This infographic from CEO.com is a good depiction of why employee engagement matters. It is essential in driving a high-performance culture. In doing research for my book, I too have found that the more creative and intellectually challenging the work, the more employee engagement predicts performance in the work place. If your business depends more upon the intellect of your workers than their brawn, you will want to focus on employee engagement to maximize productivity. I’ll be writing more about this in upcoming posts.
I came across this Success Is a Squiggly Line diagram from Demetri Martin at Lifehacker.com. I love the message, because it accurately describes what a company goes through on the path to success. While I founded and successfully exited two companies to large returns for the team and investors, the path to success was anything but straight.
In an earlier post I described a board meeting where I recommended shutting down one of the companies after the events of 9/11 made it difficult to sell anything. I could tell you about another half a dozen times where I thought the companies would likely fail. As a CEO, you will rarely feel completely confident that your company is going to be a big success.
The phrase I use is paranoid optimism. I think that phrase captures the natural state that a good CEO adopts. There is a constant level of stress: The path to success has too many twist and turns to ever feel comfortable. Which is one reason I’m not desperate to jump right back into the CEO chair!
But I do believe that as a CEO you can set yourself up to be a good leader and make the best decisions possible at any given time, which is the reason I started this blog.
See also: Steering clear of other CEO’s mistakes
Judging talent and putting it to best use for both employee and organizational growth is one of a CEO’s most important responsibilities. One of my favorite stories about recognizing and employing a person’s unique talents (or not) comes from the 1984 Olympic basketball trials. The coach of the team was the legendary Bobby Knight, arguably […]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VBsSi20wyc
We Are Austin Tech tells the stories of Austin’s movers and shakers in 5-minute video increments, and I was honored to be the subject of their most recent video.
A recent article in Business Insider reported that Yahoo’s hiring process is taking so long that they are losing out on talented people (and aggravating their employee base). The culprit? CEO Marissa Mayer’s bureaucratic tendencies. I believe that CEOs should be as involved as they can in hiring, but the process described by Business Insider’s […]
Does Samsung really need three CEOs?
Boy this is a strange one: Samsung recently announced that two of its presidents will assume co-CEO roles with current CEO Kwon Oh-hyun. Three CEOs. Since CEO stands for Chief Executive Officer, having three CEOs in one company is a little oxymoronic. I am a big believer in the need for having a single person responsible for the performance of an organization. Why? In practice, it is really difficult for the multiple CEO concept to work effectively. I understand why people feel like two or three heads must be better than one and that better decisions will result. I think those benefits can be obtained without the disadvantages of the multi-CEO structure by copying a practice from the military.
For example, in the U.S. Navy every commanding officer of a ship also has an executive officer who reports directly to him. All of the department heads report through the executive officer. This provides a training position for future commanding officers in addition to providing someone for the commanding officer to bounce ideas off of without compromising the chain of command. This can be accomplished in larger companies by putting a president in place between the CEO and the rest of the functional leaders. This way you gain the value of having multiple heads on a problem without clouding the question of who is responsible at the end of the day.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg considers “Now, Discover Your Strengths” by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton the best business book she has read in recent years. Not only that, she recently told The New York Times the book has been “instrumental” in how Facebook manages its employees. As […]
A CNNMoney/Fortune article today titled “Why the CEO-chair split matters” reports on how a group of union retirement funds believes that CEOs should not also serve as chairman of the board at their companies because it is a conflict of interest. Here’s my take on it. I understand why many people find it an appealing idea […]
Great event with the Governor this morning during SXSW to discuss how to further Texas as a hotbed of high-tech growth and innovation
.@governorperry: What we’ve created here is global. #CEOSummit #SXSW twitter.com/TexGov/status/…
— Office of Gov Perry (@TexGov) March 8, 2013
The most important leadership skill is, clearly, the ability to make great people decisions, to put people in the right seats and to rigorously take them off the bus when you have to. Jim Collins during a Charlie Rose interview I agree that selecting the right personnel is one of the most important responsibilities of a […]
Recently I wrote an article about “how to hire candidates with creative initiative.” The following anecdote from Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook is a great example of this. It’s also a great example of one of the most important people skills: The ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and understand what they need from […]
The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI today after just eight years in office presents a great case study for leaders of any organization: When is the right time to step down? In the Pope’s case, there was really no pressure from outside stakeholders, since no Pope had resigned in the last 600 years. His motive […]
Everyone is commenting on the recent Yahoo memo banning working from home. While most of the discussion revolves around whether allowing employees to work from home is a good idea or not, I want to look at the memo from a CEO perspective. The first thing I noticed about the memo was that “Jackie,” the […]
People react in different ways to the burden of responsibility the CEO role entails. In my last two CEO failure mode posts, I painted two extremes between the Total Control CEO who tries to control everything, and the Master Strategist who gives up all control after communicating a grand strategy. The question is: How do […]
This article is part of the CEO failure modes series… I spent my first four years after college in the U.S. Navy teaching at the Naval Nuclear Power School. The military has an advantage from a management perspective, because what they do IS a matter of life and death. Because of this they understand the importance […]
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo teaches a course on “managing at Twitter” to new managers, according to a recent article in Business Insider. Why would a busy CEO take the time to teach a management class to employees? Here’s what he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview: I have to make sure people are […]
People take various paths to get to the CEO chair, resulting from a mix of education, experience, and other factors. CEO.com recently published the following infographic - The Long Road to Becoming CEO - that sketches the demographics of S&P 500 and Fortune 500 CEOs. The variety of study and experience depicted speaks to the uniqueness of the CEO role: As I’ve mentioned before, the CEO position is so different that few people are prepared for it, no matter how well they’ve performed in other executive roles. I started this blog to help CEOs address this challenge.
One interesting fact to me as a former engineer is that the most common field of study for S&P 500 CEOs is engineering at 20% (yet the most common functions they come from are finance, operations, marketing, and sales). I recently discussed key considerations for engineers who want to become founders and CEOs.
I actually interview everyone at SpaceX personally. And we’re a 500-person company, so that’s a lot of interviews. What do I look for? It depends on the task. You know, it’s different, and I’m not necessarily looking for someone who has brilliant analytical ability if their job is going to be assembling hardware. But I […]
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-has-a-bad-habit-of-being-late-all-the-time-2013-1
Business Insider has published a follow-up to their story about an e-mail from an alleged Yahoo employee who accused Marissa Mayer of always being late to meetings. Numerous sources corroborate her tardiness, according to the article. I addressed this e-mail about Mayer and the negative ramifications of CEOs who are habitually late in my recent post: Perpetually late CEOs fail to impress. Bottom line in my opinion: Showing up late to meetings is one of the worst sins a CEO can make.
I am involved with a lot of different organizations, which means I attend many meetings with people I don’t know very well. Often these meetings start with the task of everyone going around the room and introducing themselves. For me this is a painful process: Since many people like hearing themselves talk, these introductions can […]
The Presidential Inauguration takes place every four years but at any given time, 14 to 15 percent of CEOs are in their first year of office, according to global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Many of these CEOs are new to the job. Whether becoming the leader of a brand new enterprise or […]
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of hosting the Austin Technology Council’s first CEO Forum of the year at The Driskill Hotel here in Austin. As Chairman of the ATC, I am proud to help promote the growth and success of the Austin tech community. We had a distinguished group of executives in the […]
Judging By This Angry Email, Marissa Mayer Hasn’t Yet Wowed ALL Yahoo Employees
Photo Credit: zoutedrop via Compfight cc
Every new CEO faces some resistance, and high profile ones like Marissa Mayer are especially susceptible to attention-getting PR stunts from disgruntled employees or people pretending to be them. So this e-mail from an alleged Yahoo employee should be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless of the letter’s authenticity, it does bring up an interesting point about her being late to every meeting so far: I think showing up late to meetings is one of the worst sins for a CEO (especially a new one).
Being late to meetings the CEO probably initiated in the first place basically says to employees: “My time is more valuable than yours – not only each individual employee but everyone at this meeting combined.” This behavior flouts one of the three critical tools I’ve asserted that every CEO needs to excel: caring. If the actions described in this e-mail are accurate, Mayer will not be a very successful CEO. I’ll write more about how new CEOs can set themselves up for success in a later post.
CEO Forum: Building, Growth and Exits
I’ll be leading the Austin Technology Council’s first CEO Forum of 2013 this Tuesday, January 15th from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Driskill Hotel. The discussion will focus on building a company for a successful exit. Register here to join us.
