It is not enough to say you’re going to be great

To all CEOs, it’s not enough to say that your company is going to be great. To have any chance at being great, you need to need to go much further and at the minimum have simple answers to the following questions?

  1. What is the company going to be great at? The answer should not be everything. You must be able to complete the following equation: Company = X (e.g. Google = Search; Walmart = Low Prices;  Zappos = Custom Service). If you are writing five paragraphs with words like “solutions”, “integrated”, “full-service” or “monetization”, go back and start again.
  2. What is the definition of great for your company? The answer should not be “a really big company that makes a lot of money”. Yes, making a bunch of money is great, but you are not going to be next Google. If you had just 1% of Google’s 2009 revenue (23 billion), you would be making $230 million. Lets not get greedy now.
  3. Who and what do we need to be great? The answer should not be acquisitions, outsourcing, capital or more executives. It should be a list of talents, skills and infrastructure needed to support your employees.
  4. Who are trying o be great for? The answer should not be our shareholders and investors. The answer should be a specific type of customer, not everyone. Also, don’t forget your employees!

One other quick point. You will not be determining whether you have reached your goal of being great. Your employees and customers will. Try asking them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 9:07 am and is filed under business, ideas. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

One comment

  1. Michael
    January 26, 2010 at 9:30 am

    CEOs are essentially managers. They are rarely visionaries

    Further, CEOs usually inhabit such rarified worlds that they almost never understand the wants and needs of Joe Citizen. For example, do you think any CEO of any major company actually sits on hold waiting for customer service at any company, let alone his or her own company?

    And, we are all to blame. We want our shares to go up, so we make more money on stocks or our retirement accounts. Any company that loses money we deem a poor choice, and pull up stakes and go to the next hot commodity. Such short-term investing encourages CEOs themselves to think short-term.

    Finally, as we see now, CEO compensation has little to do with company performance. In fact, because most CEOs have friends who sit on the board of directors, they can do just as well when running a company into the ground as when they are successful. Until we change this model, there is no incentive for most CEOs to do a decent job.

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