As time passes and your business grows, challenges hit departments unevenly, and the laggards will need help. Your job as CEO is to keep an eye on each department in your company, sense which one is struggling the most, then dive into that department to pull it forward.
As Dave Seldon, CEO of Interpacific Management Group, found, doing business in Asia is entirely different, based on the firm foundation of friendship. But this doesn’t happen over the internet or telephone; it’s a long process involving personal contact.
CEOs are visionary, so we see visions. Sometimes our enthusiasm and forward thinking makes those visions diverge from what is possible within time and budget restraints. Tom Oliver, CEO of CoolSystems, found a path between hard choices.
Many major firms see the advantages of off-shoring, but fail badly in the execution. Edward Kit, CEO and Founder of Software Development Technologies, knows that the off-shoring solution has many potential problems, and he prepares for and anticipates them all.
Stepping down to a lower level and actually doing the job is not glamorous, nor is it the best use of a top executive’s time over the long haul. But Jim MacDonald, CEO of RF MacDonald Co., found out how incredibly powerful this tactic can be.
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).