The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
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Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#2Previously discussed on HN 535 days ago, still a good article:
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#3I've been a co-founder a couple of times, but never a CEO. At one startup (not a co-founder, but was around it before it started), we took on a new CEO (new to us, first time CEO to him) to try and get the company directed the right way. For a time we did. About a year after that we hit a snag and things started going south.
Sometime during all of this the CEO took a pay cut, and then simply checked out (BAD BAD BAD). We ended up in a crisis and with nobody at the helm to guide us through it the crisis got worse. Executive decisions were made, but without a corporate officer to direct liability to, things were very "sketchy". Eventually it got so bad the investors decided to sell the company off and recoup what they could, but needed the CEO to stay on for some legal reasons -- they gave him no pay, he provided no interaction with anybody in the company. It was beyond unpleasant.
Talking with him later on he admitted he was embarrassed things had gone the way they did, but justified his behavior that half pay means half time and no pay means no time. There was some realization that with a few simple decisions early on (when it was just a snag) probably would have resulted in no pay cut and full time, plus a graceful exit. But hindsight is 20/20 and it's an experience that he and the management learned tremendously from.
TL;DR The real problem was that when times were good, he was the captain of a proud, well run sailing ship at full sail. When we ended up in a storm, his psychology told him to take cover, even as the ship sank into the abyss.
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#4Amazing write up - quite informative - interesting how non-CEO's do not understand and greatly underestimate the value a good CEO brings to the equation.
It's easy to talk about the CEO when he is not listening or present... but they can't imagine the work behind the scenes.
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#5I've been a co-founder a couple of times, but never a CEO. At one startup (not a co-founder, but was around it before it started), we took on a new CEO (new to us, first time CEO to him) to try and get the company directed the right way. For a time we did. About a year after that we hit a snag and things started going south. Sometime during all of this the CEO took a pay cut, and then simply checked out (BAD BAD BAD)…
No need to add identifiable details, but what sorts of things were part of "we hit a snag and things started going south."
I can imagine someone checking out in the ways you describe, but only in the face of mind-melting obstacles, the kind that cause people to lose all hope and throw in the towel once spotted.
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#6Previously discussed on HN 535 days ago, still a good article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2396120
Edited the title to (2011).
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#7Most difficult CEO skill? That's a life skill. Not to dismiss how hard it must be to be a CEO because I couldn't imagine it but those lessons apply everywhere. Replace the word CEO with the word life and you have an article about how to manage the stress of everyday life.
Edit: I really really don't want to sound dismissive, that's really not the intent.
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#8Most difficult CEO skill? That's a life skill. Not to dismiss how hard it must be to be a CEO because I couldn't imagine it but those lessons apply everywhere. Replace the word CEO with the word life and you have an article about how to manage the stress of everyday life. Edit: I really really don't want to sound dismissive, that's really not the intent.
Just because something is a crucial life skill doesn't mean it can't also be a critical CEO skill, or any other job-skill for that matter.
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#9I've been a co-founder a couple of times, but never a CEO. At one startup (not a co-founder, but was around it before it started), we took on a new CEO (new to us, first time CEO to him) to try and get the company directed the right way. For a time we did. About a year after that we hit a snag and things started going south. Sometime during all of this the CEO took a pay cut, and then simply checked out (BAD BAD BAD)…
>justified his behavior that half pay means half time and no pay means no time.
Am I misguided to think that people who use this as an excuse would never work twice as hard / twice as long when given twice the pay?
Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)
#10I've been a co-founder a couple of times, but never a CEO. At one startup (not a co-founder, but was around it before it started), we took on a new CEO (new to us, first time CEO to him) to try and get the company directed the right way. For a time we did. About a year after that we hit a snag and things started going south. Sometime during all of this the CEO took a pay cut, and then simply checked out (BAD BAD BAD)…
No need to add identifiable details, but what sorts of things were part of "we hit a snag and things started going south." I can imagine someone checking out in the ways you describe, but only in the face of mind-melting obstacles, the kind that cause people to lose all hope and throw in the towel once spotted.
A lot of it was just execution problems. But I think it summarizes into a perfect storm of moving the development team to a new product and putting the existing money maker on bug fix only, two rounds of dedicated sales staff that woefully underperformed (sometimes comically so looking back), and the landscape of paying customers going into insecure funding situations of their own.
On those points:
1- Moving the staff to another project was a tough call, but one I think I would have made in the CEO's position, it just was a gamble that didn't work out as well as we were hoping as it took new product iterations off the shelf for too long. But while the old product was keeping the lights on, its growth curve wasn't going to get us to where we needed to be.
2- I'm actually interested in HN's ideas on hiring good sales/marketing staff and how they should best be managed. Across half a dozen companies now I've failed to really find good competent sales people and any effective way of managing them without getting in their way. It's just a very hard position to hire for -- hiring engineering is a piece of cake in comparison. I think if I were CEO of a small startup, sales people would be hired on 90 day probationary periods. But I've heard counter arguments that sales folks in my vertical really require 6-9 months to build out their sales pipeline and start seeing results. However, some of the issues were stupid, like not answering phone calls or failing to handle simple contract negotiations without blowing the deal, or not wanting to manage contract staff to execute on part of the sale and simply moving on to other opportunities.
3- The customer situation was a surmountable obstacle I think by expanding the size of the sales net we were throwing out there. There were several related markets with better funding sources we could have gotten into that we didn't take seriously until it was too late. We also had some immediately good opportunities that got bungled because of #2 above and because the margins weren't as good as other opportunities that we chased instead and failed capitalize on anyways.