BEING A CEO Learnings
Vamsee Krishna
MBAEx – 62/13
Please identify the major challenges in at least six of the following ten areas from the interactions
with speakers of the ‘Being a CEO’ course:
1. Developing managerial effectiveness through relevant skills such as time-management,
prioritization, strategic thinking, decision-making, and getting up to speed with the job
If one fails to time-management, prioritize, or hold up on decision making it will lead to paralysis of
decision making and in today’s world that would lead to a certain doom.
Key learning’s:
Fail fast, iterate fast is the way to go.
Be vulnerable, don’t try to be demigod. You will go wrong. You will fail many times and
that’s ok.
You need to take many decisions every day and ensure you take a call.
One should lead by example.
Develop the power to influence the lives of your subordinates.
Build Empathy
Be a leader and you will automatically head to be a CEO. Keep reading 30 hours a day. Keep
giving back.
Leadership is action not a position.
Be ahead of the change, not behind, lead the change. Keep updating your skills.
2. Inspiring or motivating others to ensure they’re satisfied with their jobs and working smarter
and developing trust.
Lack of motivation leads to burn out of the employees and their productiveness goes down.
Employees should always be motivated.
Key learning’s:
Leadership – Set your units vision/values. Ensure every one’s personal actions reflect these
values. Keep on communicating these vision and values. You have no choice but to over
communicate. You may be overbearing but its ok, continue doing it.
Walk the talk, as a leader you need to follow what you have set as the vision & values.
Be transparency, Uniform and Consistent in dealing with people, No favouritism.
3. recruiting the right person, developing employees, including mentoring and coaching
You are as good as your team. If you have wrong team members or employees who are not properly
trained then your company will not be performing at optimum level.
Key learning’s:
Teams should have complementary skills;
Team is all about collective strengths of individuals.
Focus on the strengths of the team members rather their weakness.
Everyone in the team should not have same level of skills also.
Culture in the company is not created by the leader alone, the first 50 people of the
company defines the culture of the company
The team should be given adequate challenging jobs to keep them engaged in the company
and thereby retaining them.
Technology has a short shelf life. Hence recruit people who are curious to learn. Curiosity
should be given more weightage than the technical skills, while recruiting the candidate.
Look for open mind, positive attitude and humble traits while recruiting senior positions in
the company
It is the responsibility of the COE to ensure young talent is properly trained.
5. Meeting the challenge of managing, mobilizing, understanding, and leading change
Key learning’s:
Advocate adaptive planning
Evolutionary development
Early Delivery
Continual Improvement
Encourage rapid and flexible response to change
Deliver value that customers seek faster and better than the competition
Leadership here is collaborative, empowered and self-organizing
6. Meeting the challenge of managing relationships, politics, and image including gaining
Board support, managing internal and external stakeholders, and getting buy-in from other
departments, groups, or individuals.
Key learning’s:
Every stakeholder is important. For that the CEO needs to be transparent and keep
communicating his ideas and his actions to all the stakeholders.
Communication is the only way to build the trust and getting the buy-in of the stakeholders.
Create a culture that promotes engagement.
Plan for Succession, develop future leaders.
Encourage frank, 2-way communication.
Focus on empathy not necessarily sympathy
9. Handling pressure at work, dealing with unknowns, staying motivated, maintaining focus,
information overload, being disliked by employees
There can be multiple reasons for pressure at work. It could be because of
Failures
Business model issues
Disintermediation – Not creating enough value for the customer to keep coming back
Poor execution
Inadequate capital
Team challenges
Regulation changes
Environment changes
Key learning’s:
The Founding team NEEDS TO BE STRONG, must bring different skillset or perspectives. It
helps to have diverse team
10. Entrepreneur specific challenges in terms of deciding when to take the first leap, fund raising,
choosing the product and/or market, finding customers, handling self-doubt
Key learning’s:
One needs to check the following before deciding on when to be an Entrepreneur.
Is it a big enough, is it a problem worth solving, is it playing to my strengths, is someone
willing to pay for it. Technology comes latter
You have a prototype or a working model
Before you scale up, tweak your models, u may not know everything but keep on tweaking
till you have a clear solution. You cannot keep changing while scaling. It will not work.
Many process are automated and don’t require any manual effort
For Fund Raising check the following
You have a working product with multiple customers paying full price
Your team is able to stay lean even as the customer base grows exponentially
The revenue per employee has increased sharply and the product/service generates margins
greater than 50% or more
The business is open ended and continuously innovating as technology and the times change
It’s possible to white label, franchise, or license the product and Services.
The founders are willing to give up some control to investors in order to fund the business
beyond revenue.
Your business model is showing real leverage and at least a potential path to profitability
that attracts the funding to keep growing.
Your market opportunity is continuing to be validated as big enough and growing fast
enough for you to be able to meet stakeholder expectations for years to come as you scale
successfully.
