Book cover via Amazon
Whether you are a home office worker, an entrepreneur, or a corporate CEO, your job as the leader of your business is to succeed. Success does not come from good ideas of even brilliant performance unless it is totally integrated with the mission or your company, which, in one way or another, must come down to the bottom line of making money.
Recognizing that inescapable fact, a leader’s job is both less complex, but more difficult than one might imagine.
At a tech conference I attended, Glyn Meek, President and CEO of Triactive, now President and CEO of Software On Sailboats explained his theory that the job of CEO, has only 2 components:
- Never stop raising money.
- Create a buzz about the company.
Someone Else Can Do Everything Else
True, although this is particularly applicable to high tech start ups where “two young geeks in a garage” create the original technology and, at some point, someone has to bring in venture capital and they definitely will want an adult, that is someone with major big company experience,to run the company.
From this skeletal beginning three other jobs of a boss/leader become clear.
Building An A Team
The CEO or leader must be a team builder. Having a marketing whiz or a tech guru or even a bona fide genius on hand is simply not enough in today’s increasingly complex, rapidly changing, intensely competitive business environment. To both keep pace and solve complex problems quickly you need a team and not just any team. Having an A team is absolutely mandatory. A CEO must be secure enough to hire A players, people who are as smart and talented and driven as he or she is, and more accomplished in their particular area of expertise.
A Players vs B Players
If you don’t hire A players but rather B players, you will not only not achieve the results you want, but your company’s performance will tend to deteriorate, or, at the least, require a lot more energy to sustain as time goes on. B players trigger certain dynamics, since they aren’t likely to hire A players and may not be secure enough to hire even B players. Your company’s performance may decrease as employees begin to consist of more and more C players. This is what Glyn Meek called the Meek Theory of Company Deterioration.
Install Systems to Insure Communication and Synchronization
Once you have your A team on board, then you must constantly communicate with them and put in place systems within your organization which allow your team to stay in constant contact with each other.
Ram Charan, advisor to CEOs of Fortune companies like GE, Ford, DuPont, EDS, Universal Studios and Verizon, believes that continuous and focused exchange of information leads to synchronization in a company which leads to success.
“A synchronized organization is like a champion rowing team-people working together with a certain rhythm that allows the group to do things the individual could not do. Synchronization expands the capacity of the whole group” Ram Charan points out in What the CEO Wants You to Know.
The reason why many small businesses never expand is because they don’t know how to create mechanisms for constant communication between individual employees and managers.
Whether it’s through regular conference calls, emails or personal meetings, it is the job of the CEO to see that there is continuous communication and feedback throughout the organization.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road-Creating a Sales Organization
Giving your organization a sales orientation, rather than a development orientation will make or break your company. No matter how superior your product or effective your service, there are no positive financial results, which business is all about, until you get a customer, and consequently generate revenue. ( Meek developed a very unique and fresh approach to solving this as-old-as-selling problem. Clearly the Internet has changed the face of sales prospecting. More information is available now than ever before. Raw business information is available from open-sources like LinkedIn, Spoke or Jigsaw. So his company integrated a browser within Desktop Sales Explorer to help you gather business details into your prospecting database. And Desktop Sales Explorer directs the integrated browser to help you find email addresses, home pages, contact information and more. Pretty slick, no?)
As Meek put it, “Rome didn’t build a great empire by holding meetings. They did it by killing all who opposed them.”
Metaphorically speaking, the only way to douse your competitor’s flame is to overwhelm them with so many successful sales by your organization that they become increasingly unable to compete.
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