Be CEO E-Book

Pietro Santoro

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

What's the thinking of the best CEO's of the world? How to understand where you are as CEO and top priorities to effort? How to create a vision? How a mission? How a strategy? How a related and sustainable action plan? What's the secret of a successful CEO and Company? How many meetings organize? What's the best agenda for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly meetings? These and other questions are clearly analyzed in the book and for all of them you will find effective answers and examples.

Leseprobe

Preface

Why and for whom I wrote this book

STEP No.1 Becoming a CEO

Are you ready to be a CEO?

Knowing yourself

Create yourself a plan

Help others get to know you

Before you begin

Before you accept the job

Are you climbing on board a sinking ship without knowing it?

Why is a CEO needed?

Why you?

Before you start work

The first day on the job (official)

Final suggestions before you start

The first moves on a technical level

Is there any money at the end of the month? …and after that?

Strategic customers and suppliers

What is the staff's state of mind?

Problems with the Law or the Fiscal Authorities?

STEP No.2 Entering into the heart of the company

Understanding the business

Who am I selling to?

What makes me stand out?

How do I get to the customer's home?

How do I talk to the customer?

Where does the money come from?

What do I need to get the wheels turning?

The people and the organization in general

The ownership

Money

What needs to be done?

Do I need a hand?

How much will all this cost me?

Give the business a score

What is happening outside?

Porter and his 5 forces

The power of the customers

The power of the suppliers

Replacement products and services

New entrants

Competitors

Beyond Porter: the PEST analysis

STEP No.3 Vision, mission, goals and strategies

The vision

What it is

Where the "dream" comes from

Examples

The mission

What it is

Where it comes from

Examples

The strategic goals to set yourself

Finance is not everything

Set short and long-term goals

A relentless race towards an ambitious strategic goal

Goals from the top down

Strategy

What it is

How it emerges

Using your head

Using your heart

Who makes the decision

Which strategy to choose

Let's be different!

Let's produce at the lowest possible cost

How to be more efficient

How to reduce waste

Let’s change our sea: blue ocean

Why blue?

Why a blue ocean strategy is effective

Blue ocean handbook

Obstacles

Those who have already applied it successfully

STEP No.4 Strategy execution (or bringing home the results)

Why we often make smoke without fire

How to score a goal

The obstacles: how to overcome them

Transforming goals into critical activities

Overcoming the organizational obstacles

Why change?

Are the resources sufficient?

Motivating change

Tackling internal struggles

Commitment and involvement

Aligning mind (strategy) and body (organization)

When to work by projects

When to prefer processes

Putting the right people in the right place and managing them

Motivating the resources

Suggestions

Principles

Rules

STEP No.5 Making sure that the strategy's actions are aligned with the numbers and words

With numbers…

Is the ownership satisfied?

Are the customers satisfied?

Are the processes working correctly?

Are the human resources satisfied and motivated?

With words…

For effective communication

Meetings: how many, which, how often, with whom, for what reason, how to conduct them

Assessing the resources: the most powerful feedback of all

Assessing the position

Assessing skills

Assessing performance

Internal sponsorship and marketing

Phases of the assessment process

Basis for assessment (what is being assessed?)

Measurement methods (how is the assessment made?)

Players involved (who is assessing and who is being assessed?)

Assessment and review of the system

Assessing potential

Thanks

Bibliography

Biography

PIETRO SANTORO

BE

CEO

5 steps to the success of your company

The right questions to ask and examples to follow in order to achieve your goals

To Marica, the woman I have loved since childhood

To Sasà and Titti, my life

Preface

Becoming the CEO of a company, whether large or small, is a major professional and personal goal, regardless of whether this takes place as the result of a generational transition or your rise to the top of the organization. The result achieved involves preparation, experience, commitment and passion.

However, even the most well-trained and capable managers, when faced with such a change, when taking on this new role and placing themselves at the helm of the ship, might lose their bearings. They might find it difficult to get an overall vision of the company that they will soon be managing, feel uncertain about the way to present themselves to co-workers, come up against problems when defining the vision, the mission, the goals and strategies to pursue and have doubts about the methods and timing with which to proceed.

The author of the book, Pietro Santoro, has used his professional experience to address all those people who are about to become CEOs, providing them a manual that will guide them step by step through the different phases that they will need to experience and face.

From a preliminary analysis of the company in which you will become a CEO to the way in which you should present yourself on your first day, you will need to be engaged, from the first moves to make on a technical level to the definition and communication of the vision, the mission and the corporate strategy and the implementation, monitoring and assessment of the strategy put in place. For all the crucial phases, Pietro Santoro indicates the questions that good CEOs should ask themselves, including which tools to use, the elements to consider and the figures with whom they should surround themselves.

The book Be CEO is a clear, organized text, full of insights and motivational factors, and is a useful tool that targets emerging CEOs. This book is the result of experience in the field and one that clearly shows the dedication with which the author devotes himself to his work.

Why and for whom I wrote this book

I was in the park with my 9-year-old son Sasà one morning. As he hopped from one game to another, he asked me: "Dad, what job do you do? When you say you're in a meeting, what are you doing? And what about when you say you're going to see customers abroad? After you leave me at school tomorrow, what are you going to do? Have you got a diary too? How do you decide what to do every day, every week or every month?

I wrote this book as a result of my son's questions and it is a reply to those questions that many chief executive officers or future CEOs ask themselves.

The primary goal of every business is profit. That said, a good CEO must simply do three things: develop a strategy, recruit the right people and ensure that they carry out the strategy, by working closely with them. CEOs need to know beforehand that they will be judged by the results achieved and the way in which they achieve them, not by what they say or the number of times they appears in the media. This is valid for all CEOs.

You have recently been nominated CEO or you are about to become one. You will soon be replacing your father at the helm of the company or perhaps you have already done so. Whatever the case may be, you will probably be asking yourself: so what now? Where do I start? What is the best and quickest way to make my company successful? Is there a book that might be able to give me direction, advise me on the questions to ask myself and a method to follow?

This book will provide you all the answers you are looking for. Keep in mind, though, that you are already further ahead than you might think you are. The mere fact that you are asking yourself these questions shows that you are on the right track to becoming a good CEO. But now you need to concentrate. Together, we will take a look at what you need to do even before you start your new job, what you will need to do in your first ninety days on the job and what you will need to do after that. We will also look at where and how to find your vision, how to formulate the best strategies for your company and how to carry out your plan.

You will find five steps that, one after the other, will allow you and your team to lead your company to success. You will be asked some questions. What I ask of you is to always write down your answers, thus building yourself a real logbook - your diary!

STEP No.1 Becoming a CEO

Are you ready to be a CEO?

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you still have not found what it does for you, keep on looking, do not stop, as happens for matters of the heart, you'll know you have found him as soon as we 'll have the front. And, as the great love stories, it will become better and better over the years. So keep looking until you find it. Do not settle. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Steve Jobs former CEO of Apple

Becoming a CEO is an important goal in life. Some people become a CEO through a generational transition, others through professional development within an organization, but regardless of the reason, this goal is made up of three basic parts that are linked to your leadership potential:

1. knowing yourself;

2. creating a plan;

3. helping others get to know you.

Knowing yourself

"To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials."

Sir Richard Branson, CEO Virgin Group

Start with this question: do you know yourself? What kind of personality do you have? Your qualities? Your abilities? Your aptitudes? Your values? Your strengths? Yours weaknesses? What best describes your style of leadership? The following outline might be helpful to you. Take a pen and paper and write down your answers. It is essential that you do write them down. Formulating the answers in your head only, would not produce the same result. So, get your pen and paper and write. Are you ready? Good. Let's start.

✓ Behaviour: how do you prefer to behave, make decisions, control the business, etc? Do you prefer to act alone or in a team? Are you a person that makes decisions and then has subordinates carry them out or are you more oriented towards decisions made by a team of people? Do you prefer the business to be managed in a systematic, orderly, written way or more verbally with face to face meetings?

✓ Relationships: how do you prefer to communicate (method, manner, frequency), start a debate, manage a conflict, encourage people, give negative feedback, etc? Do you prefer formal or informal ways? Do you like discussions that are more political or that are detailed with data at hand? Do you tend to avoid conflicts or do you consider them a way of building something together?

✓ Attitudes: what are you capable of doing best and most naturally? What is your idea of a company, your vision, your mission, your identity (do you tend to identify more with yourself or more with the team), what fills you with positive energy and what demotivates you, discourages you, makes you gloomy? What makes you cheerful and positive and what makes you sad and negative?

✓ Values: what are your basic values? What is your approach to listening, to risk and to time frames (short, medium or long-term)?

✓ Environment: in what kind of environment do you or would you prefer to work in terms of the office, shared spaces, attire, rules, protocols, etc?

If you do not ask yourself these questions and write down your answers, it is very unlikely that your leadership style will prove effective in your role as CEO. If you are honest with yourself, you will discover that some of your preferences cannot be strengths or, vice versa, that some of your values are perfectly aligned with the type of organization in which you find yourself. As an example of the first case, think about people who are perfectionists by nature, who prefer to do all the work themselves and suddenly become CEO at the helm of a company in which the team has always been the foundation of success. What do you think the result will be when this new CEO arrives? It will be disastrous.

To answer the questions as honestly as possible, you might consider speaking to a coach, who can help you through the process, or someone who knows you very well and, without fear of offending you, can tell you or write what he or she thinks about you with regard to each of the points in question (friend, former colleague, partner, etc.).

Once you have written down your answers to the aforementioned questions, you will need to clarify your intentions and goals as a CEO, declare them to yourself and be perfectly aware of them. Otherwise, you will never be truly committed to achieving them. To this end, it will be useful to choose one or two people close to you, to whom you can communicate these intentions. The more you find it difficult to communicate your intentions to these people, the more it means that you are unsure of what you say you want to do or be. You must then try again until you feel that what you are saying is really what you want to achieve.

Create yourself a plan

"Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world…if you do so, you are insulting yourself."

Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft

After replying to the questions on the basic elements of your leadership potential, you will be ready to outline your career plan. It will have short, medium and long-term time frames.

Take the notebook in which you wrote down the answers to the questions concerning "Knowing yourself" and continue by writing down the answers to the following questions that you need to ask yourself in order to create your plan:

✓ What do I like/what don't I like. Carefully read the answers to the above questions again. Think about the activities you undertook in the past and the positions you held. Now start to list all the things that you liked most and that you liked least. You need to be specific, not generic. Try to remember single episodes, moments and things you did, the behaviour of some of your superiors or co-workers, specific situations that changed your mood positively or negatively. For example, did you like planning, team-building, participating in special projects, being praised in front of others? Did you perhaps dislike checking, implementing, being in charge of planning an event, maintaining relationships with some people? Obviously, these answers are very individual. For your role as CEO, it will be essential to know what you like and what you don't like. As CEO it is equally important that you are interested in what your co-workers like and don't like. This is because people do things they like doing with the maximum determination and enthusiasm. Consequently, the result will be much closer to what you expect from yourself and from others.

✓ Ideal work criteria. After having answered the questions about yourself and about what you like/don't like, you should have a clearer picture of whether the job you aspire to/are about to take on, namely that of CEO, responds to your criteria of an ideal job.

✓ Long-term goals. Now consider your long-term goals. Start from the end. How do you see yourself in 5 years from now? 10 years from now? 15 years from now? What do you want to achieve? What do you dream of owning, doing in your free time and what do you need in order to achieve these things? What career path can help you to achieve the things that you desire the most? From this point of view, it will be important to consider both your professional and personal life. The more you are able to sketch out your professional life, the more it will guarantee your enjoyment of a personal life that comes close to that of your dreams. You will need to ask yourself these questions at the beginning of your career path, but it is also important to perform this exercise periodically, to make sure that you are proceeding in the right direction.

✓ Options. In order to achieve your long-term goals, it is a good idea to think of multiple options that will allow you, over time, to get you where you want to be. Being fatalistic (it's this or nothing) will not help you at all and will most certainly not create all those possibilities that multiple options can provide you.

In the short-term, you will need to consider your current preferences and strengths. In the medium-term, you can think about expanding and developing your strengths, seeking alternative ways of doing so. The more you strive to improve yourself, both within and outside of the company, the more your co-workers will recognize your leadership skills. Their reasoning will be more or less the following: if he/she cares so much about his/her growth, he/she will also be able to recognize how important it is to us and will do everything possible to please us.

Lastly, in the long-term, you must decide which strengths you need to possess in order to achieve your long-term goals.

Help others get to know you

“I’ve been very lucky, from the beginning. I’ve found that as long as you’re fundamentally good – as long as you’re not being bad to people – people give you a lot of room to be yourself, because being yourself is being honest. And that’s what people want to see.”

Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon

Some strengths are nice to have and others are necessary and perhaps need to be developed in order to perform a leadership role like that of a CEO. Different roles require different strengths.

One of the most sought-after skills, along with that of leadership, is the ability to communicate. If communication is not one of your strengths and you are about to become - or you already are - a CEO, you should plan, as soon as possible, a path that will allow you to bridge this gap.

After getting to know yourself, you will need to help others get to know you. To do this, you should keep three things in mind:

1. Yourself. You cannot communicate anything important to anybody and under any circumstances if you have not first reached an understanding of who you are, what you want and what is important to you. Everything you say will be credible and tenable if your voice, your body, your words, your values and your actions are attuned to the words you pronounce.

2. The people you will be addressing. The purpose of communication is that it be received by someone who will then do something. Knowing and learning to know the people you are speaking to, discovering what is important to them and how they will react to your communication is as important as knowing yourself. Here are a few questions that you should ask yourself: who are the people with whom I will have to communicate? Be as specific as possible, including people or groups of people who might have an impact. What are these people currently doing? What are they thinking? What is important to them? What might make them change their attitudes?

3. Message. For any one of your messages to be effectively transformed into an action, it must contain the goal for which the action is needed, the vision of what will happen if the action is fulfilled and the way in which that something is expected to be done.

The people you are addressing need to understand that something different from what has been done until now is required. They need to be able to imagine a better future awaiting them if they do something different and they need to fully understand what to do to achieve this goal.

In conclusion, before you agree to become a CEO, you must ask yourself whether or not you are ready to do so and, to do this, you will need to write down your answers to the following questions:

• Is it a job I can do?

• Is it a job that I like?

• Will I succeed in having positive relationships with the people I will be working with (co-workers and shareholders)?

• Can my strengths be used in this job?

• Are my motivations aligned with this job?

Before you begin

If you are ready to be a CEO, provided of course that someone has asked you to do so, it is best to keep a few rules in mind before you begin.

Before you begin in this case means:

1. before you accept the job

2. before you start work

3. your first day on the job

Before you accept the job

To avoid climbing aboard a sinking ship, there are a few things you should make sure of before you accept the position, unless you have been called in especially to prevent the ship from sinking! What matters is that you know this and you don't discover it later on.

The main risks to avoid in this phase are dealt with in the three paragraphs that follow.

At the end of this process, the most important thing will be that you have answered the following question: should I really accept this job?