Bleeding Edge

To read this You must be a senior organizational leader hard at work building adaptive, multi-disciplinary innovation capacity, in your Company and in the World around you.

Indeed to go on reading this — You personally must aspire to Lead people to the promised land.

Even if your name isn’t Moses, you must be the CEO that brings the manna from the heavens up above.

Do this and perhaps You will be remembered as the next Moses of the Business Enterprise World…

1) Do you remember how long time ago when you were perhaps, a lowly coordinator, a division manager, a procurator, or even a senior executive, or a Director — you were fighting along for a better career? Yet it appears that you figured it all out, And judging by the fact that you found your way here — you have easily taught others what to do, same as you learned from all others you came in contact with. Your thoughts & skepticisms were kept in your pants, and you were eager to see results most often from Innovation that was tantamount to disobedience and disruption. But you went ahead and did what was expected of you. You were proud of the job that you had and you saw synergy, synchronicity, and innovation, acting in your favour — much like an executive working on your plan. Yet today, if you want to be a CEO, you must understand that alone you can not do anything and you do not have to want to do anything without consulting with others and getting their buy-in for the forward change movement. You must understand that the synergy of the entire team is something that includes you. Now, if you want to understand a situation in order to solve it, you have to integrate yourself in the midst of the issue along with the executive team. Also you must know at every moment which part of the situation is active: the integrator or the integrated.

2) You must forget the discussions about the employees status, about the production and productivity, about the work environment, etc. You already have an army of managers who deal with these issues, so you must forget the managerial view and move yourself towards a global view. You must forget caring about being endorsed by others and you must endorse yourself fully. You must forget cheap things, cheap meetings, offices, words about anything, personal grudges, pettinnes, and you must forget the imperfection and the disorder of the human capital in the work environment. You must fully understand your new work standards at any level and in any environment, because if you want to be a good to great CEO, You’ve got to prepare to manage yourself at a higher level, and a t a much higher speed of decision making. And please do not forget that at the same level with you, will be the most powerful leaders in the world. And if you recall — when you entered for the first time in your CEO office, all your managerial life and all of your past didn’t matter anymore. It all became distant history, because the future is so important. Now you need to be permanently focused not on your job-position, but on the global image of the company and all of the business units, and on the global markets that those businesses fit within.

3) A CEO is no longer interested in giving speeches or sharing memorable words, but he is far more interested to decide, execute, live and work by the code. The great CEO has to be able to understand the entire Company, at any level: from the cash position daily, from the income proceeds, from the comptroller’s reports, and from the growth charts. There is another key part of the business process, and that is to bolster and maintain the healthy global image of the company that the CEO leads, and to bring this image daily to the global market. The personal image of the CEO doesn’t matter so much in relation to the company because good CEOs are not preoccupied with personal pride. it would be inappropriate to get a peacock for this job — and yet it happens all too often. Admittedly the CEO is a person of power that executes through the simplicity of clear communication down the chain of command. Also it’s good to remember that a CEO does not speak about personal success. This is not suitable matter on a CEO speech. He knows how to lead the company to the profit, market growth, and success, as required by shareholders and the multiple bottom-lines one needs to observe. He knows how to make the whole army of Mid level execs and Mangers to move the entire entity towards innovation and functionality, at maximum efficiency and speed.

4) A CEO needs to meet as many people as soon as one can, and meet them where they live and work: Over the past year I have met in small groups or individually with as many key stakeholders and Investors as well as shareholders of my Companies as I have been able to humanly do. This was clearly the right thing to do because I always learn something from people who have different perspectives from my own. “The benefits of diversity” is more than a cliché; actively listening to diverse stakeholders makes you a better leader.  And I have always found it is better to meet people where they are, rather than in my office. It is an unwritten rule of business that meetings take place in the office of the most senior person involved and although that is convenient for people like me with wall-to-wall meeting schedules, and an air to air lifestyle — still out of respect for others I meet them in their rooms or we choose to go together for a walk in the park — which is the best meeting method by far for me and my colleagues. But it is not only a valued mark of respect to meet people where they feel at home, you also tend to learn a lot from being in their environment.

5) Leading by “aspire, inspire” is always better than top down “command and control” which in modern smart & inherently decentralized enterprises where people tend not to respond well to being told what to do, even if you have the formal authority to do so — it work miracles. Therefore, communicating a clear vision of where you want to go and then doing all you can to persuade others to join you on the journey is the best leadership strategy in Large Enterprises. But I am struck that in organizations where the chain of command is everything, such as the military, and old fashion large enterprise, the aspire/inspire leadership is what sets the real leaders apart from people who just use elevated positions to tell people what to do.

Care to guess who the next CEO of Coca Cola, Microsoft, Google, Apple, or even the WHite House will be?

Will he be a natural born Leader who inspires & aspires, or a top down hierarchical person?

I will take bets on this later today…

PLMK

Yours,

Dr Kroko

PS:

By the Way, being authentic is the best way to lead, but it’s not an excuse for not thinking before you act. The obvious benefit of authenticity is that we are all better at being ourselves than being anybody else. We call it our personal comparative advantage. And as community breeder that we are — we are all at the same time ourselves only.

However, you do this, it doesn’t matter. Just make sure to always strive to be mindful, self-aware, self-reflective, and ruthless in your compassion for others.

Always ask yourself and your subordinates: How is my behaviour affecting all the people around me, and by extension everyone else in the organization and beyond?

Think Ripples in the pond…

Is the way I am at work reflecting who I am as a person?

We are all playing professional roles at work. But the best way to succeed at work is to be your fully honest best self.

Do this and don’t expect any aclaim or aplomb, because True Leaders only do this for themselves, and for the good of the whole Organizational Entity fully knowing that they bring out the best in everyone else around them — when they are willing to bear anything and everything.

Leadership and winning is not a popularity contest for Miss America — it’s plain old school Bloody War.