How To Be a Successful CEO
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Kristi posts to her site about once a month, but frequently more often. She also appears as a featured contributer on select other sites. If you would like to be notified when new blogs are posted, please subscribe to our newsletter.
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How To Be a Successful CEO
(posted: May 19th, 2012)
The movie, "The Social Network", gave a behind-the-scenes look at Mark Zuckerberg, telling how he dropped out of Harvard while developing Facebook and has become one of the most famous, powerful, and youngest CEOs in the world.
How has he done this?
Walter Isaacson's recent biography on Steven Jobs has generated many spirited conversations about good leadership vs. bad leadership, and people have tried to pull leadership lessons and success stories from it.
I have shared many of these with my clients and colleagues.
What can we learn from these two very successful CEO's?
Leadership Lessons of Mark Zuckerberg and Steven Jobs
Taken from the ChiefExecutive.net newsletter, Fast Company Magazine and Harvard Business Review, with a few of my own, here are some lessons in leadership from two of the most famous and powerful CEO's in the world.
Make your own evolution and development as a leader a top priority
Zuckerberg is one of the few CEOs in history to come to significant power without his personality fully formed. He was smart enough to take himself on as a project and proactively continues to grow and mold himself into the leader he aspires to be.
He began by studying and evaluating the successful people and companies around him, tapping them for insider lessons in leadership.
Jobs is all about employees engaging face to face. He had the Pixar and Apple buildings designed to promote unplanned encounters and collaborations.
"If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and magic that's sparked by serendipity."
Steve Jobs
Be open and allow for true communication
Facebook keeps their employees in the loop on where the company is going, especially important in a fast-growing start up. This enhances confidence and unity.
Create a real office culture
Facebook's guiding principle is what Zuckerberg calls the Hacker Way, and so the company
"...questions assumptions, moves fast, takes risks, shares information, and learns from other smart people."
Fast Company
Tolerate only "A" Players
Jobs' passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best is his way of preventing what he called "the bozo explosion". This is when managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around.
"I've learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don't have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things."
Steve Jobs
Bend reality
They both pushed people to do the impossible because they didn't realize it was impossible. They helped their people to not be afraid once they got their mind around it, using "yes you can", my magic motto.
As a leader, your best move might be to step out of the way and let someone else take charge.
Put people and products before profit.
Involve everyone in hiring practices
When Facebook was growing, everyone helped to bring in new talent and all had interviewing duties, even engineers. After all, your current employees will be the ones working with the new hires.
"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation."
Steve Jobs
Zuckerberg's team approaches every hire with an eye on the future.
"The people we hired were capable of solving the problems we knew were coming."
Mark Zuckerberg
Practice Leadership
"Making decisions on the basis of incomplete, inconclusive, or contradictory information is a skill that managers at every level must master. The learning comes from making thousands of small choices and mistakes on the way there."
Marc Randolph; Co-Founder Netflix
Focus - trust data and your gut.
"Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That is true for companies and it is true for products."
Steve Jobs
Simplify - Cut clutter and make things easy to use.
Jobs insisted on being able to get whatever he wanted in three clicks. He even got rid of the on/off button
When behind - leapfrog.
The mark of a good leader is not only that he comes up with new ideas first, but also that he knows who to leapfrog when he finds himself behind.
Don't be a slave to focus groups.
Customers don't know what they want until we've shown them.
"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse."
Henry Ford
Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from consistently asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed.
Push for perfection.
Hit the pause button and go back to the drawing board if it is not perfect. Then take responsibility end-to-end for the employee, and the customer interface.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes
"So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure."
Mark Zuckerberg
Stay hungry; stay foolish.
"The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
Apple, Inc.
Both of these men changed themselves and will continue to change the world.
- How will you?
- What can you do to become truly successful?
This blog post was originally published at www.linked2leadership.com.