My CEO Life

One thing that i constantly do is read.  I always have a stack of throw away reading for plane trips.  I never read confidential materials about the business on a plane and really spend that time opening my mind to new ideas and thoughts – either about the industry we operate in or about new management techniques and thoughts.

Leadership is one of my hot buttons … here is a list from a management magazine of the top 8 tips for leaders

1. People are led – things are managed
2. Pay attention to people, not structures
3. Some things never change.  Leadership is a process which involves the leader and the followers in a specific situation.  It is NOT a person, a role, a position or a title.
4. In the next century, despite the on rush of technology, people are still people and need to be and like to be led.
5. In the knowledge economy, the most precious knowledge is knowing what you dont know
6. In the knowledge economy is it not what you know but how adept you are to learning
7. Knowledge is mobile – when people move so does their knowledge
8. No matter what century, without integrity, there is no leaderhip

I was recently thinking about what makes a great person in the business i run and the common trait that kept coming to mind was PASSION.

It seems to me that my team members who are truly great are those that display unflagging passion for what they do.  They don’t focus on what is in it for them, they focus on what they want to achieve for the business.

It was then interesting when i read a recent article that compared GE’s approach of rating people as either in the top 20% or bottom 10% with hiring people that are passionate.  It basically proposed that simply rating people based on quantitative measures may miss the one vital ingredient – passion.

I agree with this.  I think you need to employ passionate people as they will go above and beyond, they will more often than not make the right decision, and they will be very loyal allowing you to change the direction of the business.  The other good thing about passionate people is that they will tell you what they really think.  This allows you to get true and honest feedback from all parts of the business.

So the lesson i have learned is that sometimes a person may not be a top performer but if they have passion that is well intended and well directed you should probably work hard at finding the right role for them in the business rather than letting them go.

Have you ever wanted to leap across a table and throttle someone?  Well i had that experience yesterday – the desire, not the action.

I was called to a meeting for the launch of a new internal project.  Now i was aware of the project as it is closely tied to a recent acquisition we had made.  However, what i was not prepared for was the statement of the obvious.

Prior to the meeting, documents were distributed – volumes of them.  Now i don’t know about you, but i don’t have time to read every thing that comes across my desk so i tend to ignore long email or send a polite response back asking for a summary.

So at this kick off meeting, i was expecting to be taken through the scope of the project and to have them seek my sign off so that they could get on with it.  No, they decided to waste my time and that of other senior managers on telling us how they are going to run the project.  What a waste of my and other senior management’s time.

The bottom line is that i trust them to run a project (otherwise i would not have appointed them) and what i am interested is in knowing what you are going to do, when it will be delivered, how you are going to keep me in the loop and finally HOW MUCH it will cost!

So we had a clash of cultures – the project management / external company justifying their existence versus the high speed, rapid progress, small company that believes in see forgiveness don’t beg permission.

The way we addressed it is to call the meeting to a premature halt, explain that we all know about project management and then gave them 30 min to prepare a more focused, problem solving meeting that will actually be valuable to the business.

I cant see the point in politely sitting there and then walking out and saying – what was that all about.  Carpe diem – sieze the day!

I had one of those days yesterday.  A while ago we employed someone into our customer care center.  He was a good worked.  After a while he came upon hard times and due to a separation from his partner, he was about to be deported.

Instead of letting him go, we decided to sponsor him back into the country and to give him a chance to get his life together.  We did not have to do it as the role was able to be replaced but we thought he deserved better.

How does he repay us?

Well get this.  By accident, he was given accept to a domain name registry key for one of our sites.  Now a normal employee would pass this information on a senior person so that we can ensure that it is safely kept in place.  What does this guy do, he sits on it and then blogs to the world about how stupid the company is and how he can redirect the website etc.  He basically threatened the business.

What he didn’t know is that we have a fail safe mechanism with the company who manages the DNS and they need a separate confirming password before anything is done.

The bottom line is that no matter how much you put your faith in people and try to help them, there is always the chance that they may turn around and try it on.  That is generation Y for you!

Have you ever had one of those days when nothing, i mean absolutely NOTHING, goes right. Well yesterday was one of those days.

The day started with one of our rocket scientists confusing an “=” sign with a “>” sign and bring down a stack of websites. Now that would be bad enough however, they were our customers’ websites. Guess what – the customers went through the roof.

So, just like fighter control in WWII, we scrambled the guru’s and attacked the problem. Half a day later and a heap of customer comforting, we finally got the problem resolved. To ensure that we kept the customers happy, we gave away some free product and i ensured that a senior person called each of the customers to apologise and to ensure that they knew that the issue had been resolved.

So … what lessons can be learned

Ensure that people think before they do – especially when they are playing with a live environment. This is really a part of the culture and something that we are working on. Passionate, caring people will take responsibility and ensure that what they think before they do. Building that passions is sometimes a challenge.

Great comebacks can be achieved. We worked on the theory of being very open with our customers, kept them informed and gave them a little thanks you for putting them out. Most understand but still, our objective was to recover graciously and have them think more of us at the end of the experience than at the beginning. TIME WILL TELL!!!

A friend of mine sent the following link to me from the Educators Corner of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. (http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasting.shtml)

These are a series of very interesting podcasts from innovative Chief Executive Officers from across the technology industry. These podcasts cover leadership, entrepreneurship and how these speakers have become leaders in their industries.

The one i have just listened to is by Marissa Mayer (VP Search Products and User Experience @ Google). She shared these insights that are critical to product development at Google.

1. Ideas from everywhere. Encourage and enable idea flow and incubation. Don’t assume it will happen naturally.
2. Share all info. Provide tools/forums that make it easy to share info freely and widely internally.
3. If you’re great, we’ll hire you.
4. Provide a license to pursue dreams. 50% of new products comes from the 20% free time discipline (i.e. 4x more productive than regular time!)
5. Don’t perfect on the drawing board. Innovate and iterate (quickly).
6. Ask users thru playing with real product.
7. Data is apolitical. Data creates clarity. Use split tests all the time if you’re not sure.
8. Creativity loves constraint. Don’t start with a white sheet of paper. Set clear goals and objectives from Day 1.
9. Users not money. Money follows the users. Always.
10. Don’t kill products. Morph them into something different and better.