In any organization, the CEO has many jobs. At the macro level, a CEOs job is to instill confidence in his stakeholders, which include customers, investors, employees, suppliers, and partners. To accomplish this, a CEO must be able to establish a level of trust with these stakeholders in order to Inspire, Encourage, and Engage the stakeholders in the vision to which the entity is in pursuit of. This trust ultimately is used to create value for the entity, through the confidence that the market has in the ability of the CEO and his team to execute.

Dandelions are pesky weeds. They keep coming back until you pull the root. I’ve found that often we deal with problems by picking the flower rather than pulling the root too.

Are You Getting to the Root?

Just this week I came across a business owner who was seeking help negotiating a contract with an increasingly difficult (but very large) customer.  The customer was repeatedly asking for more concessions from the supplier and the supplier was now in a compromised position. The owner realized he needed help, but thought he needed a good negotiator.

By Rick Balsiger, Founder of Balsiger Partners, LLC

Crisis has always been viewed by some as a glass half-empty; while to others, it's a glass half-full. To the "half-full" crowd, they recognize that difficult economic times actually can be a time of extraordinary opportunity. For many forward thinking companies, they're not letting this crisis go to waste and are working to strengthen their organizations now. There are several reasons.

Official Culture vs Actual Culture

It doesn’t matter what a company promotes, internally or externally, about its way of communicating if the top executives have a fundamentally different personal style.

Even the best organizations “flex” to adjust their way of talking to match the guy(s) or gal(s) who run the show. For all the reasons linked to personal survival in a corporate culture, employees will “aim to please” by attempting to communicate the way you do. Or worse, they’ll subtly de-edify your style.

Many CEO's and executives would concur with the truism that "leadership" is ultimately more important than "management." But when it comes to real performance, superficial assent is not enough. The critical issue is what do you actually believe about leadership. Research has proven that what you believe will ultimately drive what you do and the results. So if you are looking for superior results, you need to first go upstream and assess your beliefs about leadership which will drive behaviors and ultimate outcomes.

The Principle

Employees will consistently "go over and beyond" when they are working for leaders they respect and love working for.  The following exercise will help effective leaders gain understanding of three elements from their team:

"The entrepreneurial mystique? It's not magic, it's not mysterious, and it has nothing to do with the genes. It's a discipline. And, like any discipline, it can be learned" (Peter Drucker, 1985).

Recently I attended a Boston College CEO luncheon event which had John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, presenting his vision for the future of Cisco. John did an excellent job and presented several great takeaways from this event.

I’ll admit when I started my first role as an Independent Director or Board Member for a private tech company in 2003 all I knew about governance was what I had learned as a first time CEO of my own start-up. But, you have to start somewhere…

Over the last nine years I’ve had the opportunity to serve as a Board Member to more than 10 companies.

Today's leaders are challenged with the prospect of success and failure. Every decision can make or break the leader of an organization and its future. Leaders must be focused in order to make every decision count. 

But how do you focus as the leader of an organization? The process is relatively simple. What follows is a simple formula that will provide a framework for focused, successful leadership.

The First Time is Always the Hardest

I’ve often said the first time you do anything is always the hardest. So what do I mean by that? Well, think about it. It’s a basic fact that if we go into something and haven’t done it before, we tread with a bit more hesitation. If I were to ask you to meet me someplace you had never been how would you go about getting there? The guys would likely just start driving; directions are for those who didn’t inherit the direction chromosome.

The fact of the matter is that if you did get directions first you would get there faster. It would be even more efficient if you had a navigator who had been there before and could tell you where and when to turn. Still, it would not be as quick as the second time you made the journey. If you’ve done it before, you know where to turn, exactly which building it is, where to park, etc.