The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)

#31

Post by bane » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 3:06 PM UTC

DanHulton wrote: post #27

bane wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 staf…

Good Lord, are you me? Or at least did you work with me? Exactly that same thing happened at a place I used to work at, about three or four years back. I hope you worked where I worked and we're just ships passing in the night, and not that this story is just so common.

Nope! But I suspect this story is more common than I thought? Any insight from your experience?

Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)

#32

Post by bpatrianakos » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 3:17 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #8

bpatrianakos wrote: post #7

Most 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.

Like I said, I wasn't saying that. I wasn't being dismissive. I was just observing that this is a skill that applies very broadly. I read it, got it, liked it, then thought "hey, that actually applies everywhere". It's not a knock against the author or the article. Just my reaction.

Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)

#33

Post by dscrd » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 6:16 PM UTC

hkmurakami wrote: post #9

bane wrote: post #3

I'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?

I think you might be misguided in thinking that people should work twice as hard or as long. Isn't the most important factor how much and what they're putting out?

Re: The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology (2011)

#34

Post by lionheart » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 9:41 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

bane wrote: post #3

I'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)…

I'll relate a similar anecote; dot com exploding crisis in the board room, frozen management. I reached out to Scott McNealy and asked how at Sun we had hit rough times and it got painful but it never got stuck. His response changed my whole take on things. He said, "Chuck nobody knows what they are going to be when the chips are down, they can think they will be a tiger but they sometimes they discover they are the…

I don't think anything is 100% hardwired. Sure you probably start with a mental preference for one or the other but you can change it.

Now the question is: how?

How do you expose yourself to these kinds of situations gradually so that you have a chance to get used to it?