My CEO Life

You have to love the Nike slogan – it really does epitomise many things a business should do and often doesnt. How many times have you been frustrated by the speed of decision making within a business or the speed of response by a business to make something happen. Often decisions get bogged down in politics, lack of ownership, consensus building or just fear (of making a decision). I have often experienced this when dealing with external businesses (and sometimes internally too) where people seem to take forever to make what sometimes looks like a relatively easy decision.

I think that there is a different way to run a business and one the leads to faster decision making, more responsibility passed down through the ranks and the result is a place where people get on with it, take leadership for their actions and things happen!

They say a fish rots from the head and i think this is the same with any business and the culture within the business. What a CEO and the management team do is then reflected through out the business as being the right thing to do and people (especially aspirants and politicians) will copy their actions. Therefore i think it is critical that the CEO learns to trust their gut and make rapid decisions based on knowledge and experience gained over time. If they do this, then others will follow.

In the REA Group i tried to make decisions as quickly as possible knowing that they wont always be right. I think we got it right around 8 out of 10 times. The other thing that we pushed through the group was the mantra – “seek forgiveness, dont beg permission”. I felt that if people in the business realised that i trusted them to make a decision and get on with it, they would, most times, get it right and more importantly, the business would be seen as being responsibe to market and customer needs.

Now i know that this is hard for some managers to do however if you are a real leader, rather than a manager, you will release some of the control that you naturally want to exert and give those thoughtout the business the chance to shine. You just may be surprised at the results you acheive.

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