Want to Upgrade Your Business? Upgrade Your Leadership Team!
A maturing industry requires its leaders to act differently. As industry players grow larger to manage compliance burdens and to gain access to capital, leadership styles that worked in the past can become dysfunctional.
I walk by Zynga’s cool building in San Francisco often on my way to a client I have in SOMA. So it was sad to hear of the layoff of over 500 employees. Such a fast acceleration to a billion plus in revenues, and now the growth curve has reversed. What are the lessons to be learned for other mid-sized company CEOs?
Too many CEOs try so hard to avoid the old-style command and control, “Donald Trump” style of management that they just aren’t tough enough on poor performance. Last week IBM’s CEO publicly criticized her sales function, and I think she was right to do it.
Hewlett-Packard’s $8.8 billion write-down of its $11 billion purchase of Autonomy Corp. is a stark lesson for all mid-market company CEOs who plan to grow via acquisition: Do your homework and then do it again because (unlike H-P) your firm’s survival may depend on it.
Justice is generally NOT served when a big company does battle with a middle market company. Legal fees can crush the mid-market company long before any “just” outcome occurs. To a mid-market firm, the risks of waging legal war with a big firm can be enormous.
Ceil McCloy, CEO and her husband Dave Dobson, Co-Founder of Integrated Science Solutions, Inc. (ISSI), brought in outside board members as a strategic decision. Often businesses pay only lip service to their Board, just barely fulfilling legal requirements. But bolstering the Board’s role in oversight of your business can be very beneficial, as it has for ISSI.
David Gensler, Executive Director of Gensler first faced the challenges of operating worldwide back in the 1980’s: he’s had a few decades’ head start on most of us. Read how the company’s experiences in China became a global strategy.
CEOs aren’t in sales, but they have a critical role to play. Dennis Raefield of Mace Security International (OTCQB: MACE) shows us that the proactive CEO is key in landing and retaining key customers.
Two companies merge to gain economies of scale and to create an industry leader. How many times have we heard this story only to be disappointed by the results? Where 2+2 equaled 3?
How can you make your workplace different in a way that will attract the highly skilled people you need most? Andrew Giacomini, Managing Partner at Hanson Bridgett, shows how an enlightened approach to team culture makes a law firm stand out.
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).