Journalist’s advice after writing 5 million words in 10 years!
So you want to be a CEO?
As the opening blog post of 2018, I think it is useful to reflect on one of the most widely read business columns on entrepreneurship and executive leadership.
Over the last 10 years, Adam Bryant conducted a series of interviews with CEOs and published them in a column in the New York Times, called the Corner Office. In his last article in the series, on 27 October 2017, he summarises the main learning from these 5m words and 10 years of interviews.
I have summarised this article into these points. I encourage you to go and read the main article here.
Three CEO qualities:
- Applied curiosity. They are curious about people and their back stories.
- Loving a challenge. Discomfort is their comfort zone.
- Focusing on the doing the current job well. They don’t focus on the job they want but the job they’re doing.
The most important thing(s) about leadership
- Leaders need humility to know that they don’t know enough but have the confidence to make a decision amid the ambiguity.
- You need to be emphatic and care about people but also be willing to let them go if they’re dragging the team down.
- Trustworthiness. This is the most important quality of effective leadership.
- We all have sense of what our bosses do and tell us. Do we trust them that they will be straight with us and not shave corners of truth? Do they own their mistakes; give credit where it’s due; manage down as well as up?
- If you want to lead others, you’ve got to have their trust and you can’t have that without integrity.
- A close cousin of trustworthiness is respect. It’s not how much they respect a leader, it’s how much the leader respects them!
- Culture is almost like a religion.
- The shorter set of values, the better.
- Values need reinforcement beyond repition.
- Specificity is important in values exercise.
- No matter what people say about culture, it’s about who gets promoted, who gets raises and who gets fired.
- You have to be open and alert at every turn to the possibility that you’re about to learn the most important lesson of your life.
- The differences between men and women leaders are small. They are driven by other factors than gender.
- There’s no doubt that women face stronger headwinds than men to get to the top job.
- Regardless of whether a man or woman is in charge, you have to set a vision, build cultural guardrails, foster a sense of teamwork, and make tough calls.
- The answer to “how do you hire” has received surprisingly many different answers.
- Are you smart or do you work hard? (trick question).
- Ask questions that would show people’s willingness to really talk about themselves.
- What are the qualities you like least and most in your parents?!
- Hire for work ethic. See if people have character and are making their situation work for them instead of being vicitmised by it.
- Own your job.
Top vote goes to:
Adam gives the top vote to the advice he got in his interview with Joseph Plumeri:
“Just show up. Get in the game. Go play in traffic.”
This is the sixteenth in a series of posts about our investment criteria and ecosystem resources which was also posted on LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from teams with crazy (but commercial) startups. Get in touch or attend our breakfast series. Finally, don’t forget to get your IV Score to prepare for your next VC meeting.
