The CEO Insomnia Factor
The Buried Treasure in Every Midsized Business: Digital Data
Data that top leaders and managers at all levels can trust is a fundamental piece of leading an organization that consistently makes more intelligent and competitive decisions.
How To Avoid The Root Cause of Customer Experience Meltdowns
In order for growing midsized companies to avoid a customer experience meltdown, their leadership must plan and build leadership infrastructure. Without leadership infrastructure, growing companies can be victimized by their own success.
How to Make Your Peers Accountable When Your Boss Won’t
Not holding teams accountable can stall strategic initiatives, produce backstabbing and even sabotage, and lead to the exit of talented and motivated executives. Here’s how you can introduce accountability in the workplace.
How CEOs Can Stop Vacillating Between Fear and Euphoria
Companies stop growing when they lack confidence in their decisions. Midsized company leaders need to build a “gut gauge” that will help them record their assessment of business conditions in greater detail, then reassess periodically.
The Perils of Using Dashboards to Drive a Company
IT “dashboards” have become highly seductive to CEOs of midsized companies. Who could resist up-to-date, easy-to-digest information on business performance, and how the team is performing? Not many CEOs. Yet if they knew how long and how much money it will take to install such systems—months and sometimes years—they might think twice. But whether or not companies implement them (and there are good reasons to implement them at the right time), these automated dashboards don’t replace good old-fashioned management techniques.
How 360-Degree Reviews Can Revive Careers, and Rejuvenate Firms
Do you know high-potential executives who just aren’t working their way up the corporate ladder? 360-degree reviews may be the solution.
If You’re Constantly Fighting Fires, Your Growth is Likely to Flame Out
Company leaders who are constantly putting out fires no longer have time to create the plans that will position the business for the next stage of growth.
One Way Many Midsized Firms Fail: Through ‘Mother May I’ Management
After 45 years in business, In-Common Laboratories in 2012 was suffering from a revolving door that no company wants to face: three CEOs in three years. Many challenging issues precipitated a 2010 board decision to find a new CEO for the not-for-profit provider of medical laboratory tests. In 2011, the board realized it hired the wrong CEO (No. 2) for a variety of reasons, including precipitous losses. But it wasn’t until the third CEO, Kris Bailey, showed up in 2012 that the board realized the problems ran much deeper: a “Mother May I” culture that had turned the top team into powerless managers whose ingenuity was running on cruise control.
When Boom Times Wind Down, Smart Firms Turn Quickly to Efficiency
At the end of every economic growth cycle, midsized companies tend to invest heavily in sales and marketing to steal market share. They realize that a no-longer growing market won’t raise all boats, including their own. Yet increasing sales and marketing may actually not be the best way to grow in these times. Making big efficiency gains may be far better.
Sink or Swim: How NOT to Groom Future Leaders
Forcing up-and-coming leaders to sink or swim in the pool of real experience is one way to develop future executive team members. It’s also a sure-fire method to drown some managers who have real potential. There are far better ways to develop managers than by foisting a big and unfamiliar organizational problem on them.
Robert Sher is founding principal of CEO to CEO, a consulting firm of former chief executives that improves the leadership infrastructure of midsized companies seeking to accelerate their performance. He was chief executive of Bentley Publishing Group from 1984 to 2006 and steered the firm to become a leading player in its industry (decorative art publishing).