First
Things First
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the
many wonderful readers who have sent me complimentary
and supportive letters regarding my recent editorials.
Your letters have told me that you are very interested
in what our leaders in Washington, D.C. are doing and
their affect on your businesses. You are also very
concerned about what the leaders of your own
businesses are doing (or not doing, in the case of
advertising and marketing). It seems many of you have
experienced the frustration of having either your CFO
or CEO slash marketing and advertising budgets because
they simply don't understand that such an action will
most likely have a devastating affect on the company's
long-term prosperity.
Unfair Treatment Of Some CEOs By The Press
In fairness, most CEOs are bright individuals whose
contributions to their corporations and their
employees are positive, which is why it disturbs me
that in recent articles in the national press, several
CEOs were attacked as being responsible for the
decline of the value of their shares in the stock
market. In fact, such declines had nothing to do with
the CEOs, but very much to do with the totally
uncalled for rapid rise in interest rates directed by
Alan Greenspan to fight non-existent inflation (as
explained in my March 2001 editorial).
One such newspaper article appeared in the New
York Post on Sunday, April 29, 2001 on page 54.
The headline for this
article was "The Big Executive Rip-Off: While CEOs
Get Big Bucks Shareholders' Returns Sink"! In this
harshly worded article by Emily Lambert, the CEOs of
several major corporations were portrayed as villains
or tyrants who paid themselves very high salaries
ranging from $48 million to $225 million a year while
their stockholders lost anywhere from 22% to 61% of
their portfolio values. The article also included the
following quote:
"When Business Week releases their list of
the 10 companies with the highest paid CEOs for
2000, that would be a good list of stocks to sell
short."
When you consider the true achievements of many
CEOs of major corporations, you realize that the
article was totally unfair and as the saying goes, "It
was barking up the wrong tree"! The attack should have
been directed at Alan Greenspan, whose completely
foolish action of rapidly raising interest rates in
the year 2000 caused the turmoil on Wall Street,
thereby creating over 5 1/2 trillion dollars of losses
in portfolio values from 401Ks, employee pension plans
and all other investments from a variety of small and
large investors. In my opinion, the executives
mentioned in this article, such as Sandy Weill of
Citigroup, John Chambers of Cisco, Jozef Straus of JDS
Uniphase and David Wetherell of CMGI, to name a few,
should be considered as some of the greatest chief
executives and visionaries of our time. It is truly a
shame that some authors cannot see the forest from the
trees. As I have stated in many of my editorials, it
is unfortunate that trash journalism sells newspapers!
Putting Matters In Perspective
Having risen from extremely modest beginnings, i.e.,
delivering Manhattan phone directories in New York
City and getting attacked by dogs and selling vacuum
cleaners door-to-door and later working in plastics
factories to currently CEO of Technology Marketing
Corporation, I feel I have observed a great deal about
what a CEO should be or should not be. I therefore
would like to share some of my views that are gained
from firsthand experience.
What An Ideal CEO Should Be
A CEO, like anyone else in any corporation, must earn
his or her pay. The CEO must be a strong leader and
lead by example. In addition to being a good
businessperson, an effective CEO should have most, if
not all, of the following attributes.
- Must Be A Facilitator -- Perhaps one of
the most important functions of a CEO is to be a
facilitator and help make the job of everyone else
easier, not more difficult. Believe it or not, I
have observed a number of ego-driven CEOs who have
no common sense and have actually made life
extremely difficult for their employees and
colleagues, thereby damaging the corporation.
- Must Be A Visionary -- In the dictionary,
a visionary is described as one who is given to
seeing visions; one who indulges fanciful
theories. In my opinion, a visionary is one who
can see a path of the future, which is not obvious
at all to non-visionaries. Without a clear vision,
a CEO will not be able to provide a direction for
the rest of the organization to work toward.
- Must Sell The Vision -- Once a vision has
become worthwhile for the CEO to take action on,
he or she must then sell the vision by providing
convincing and compelling evidence and reasoning
to the entire company so that everyone is on board
and on the same page. Without this action, the
vision will go nowhere.
- Must Keep Everyone Focused And Call For
Action -- In many organizations, when
leadership is too creative and a CEO is unable to
prioritize the many ideas and work on them one at
a time with 100 percent focus, the ideas often get
nowhere because no one in the organization has a
clue as to what to do or what not to do. In many
organizations, you will find that several ideas
are floating around due to lack of focus and
nothing gets done on any of these ideas. Thus,
ideas without action are worthless. In my opinion,
this is even worse than having no idea because the
results are the same.
- Treat Everyone With Respect -- A great
leader must treat his or her employees, customers
and vendors with the utmost respect. In my
judgment, the greatest assets of any corporation,
in alphabetical order, are customers, employees
and vendors. I call this group of three crucial
components the golden triangle (see the September
1999 "Publisher's
Outlook").
- Must Help All Employees Grow -- As the
CEO, you must be extremely prudent when hiring
employees, always looking for people who have a
positive, flexible, can-do attitude. You want to
surround yourself with people who are true team
workers, dedicated and resourceful (see my editorial
on hiring in the February 1998 issue). Once
you have a team of competent, creative and
ambitious people in your organization who are
anxious to accept greater responsibility, it is
the job of the CEO to help every employee grow and
position each for greater responsibilities.
- Promote From Within -- If a CEO truly
follows the above, the next crucial ingredient for
building a successful organization is to promote
from within. I can state categorically that at
TMC, some of the best performers are those who
were promoted from within. If a CEO is truly
interested in keeping his or her outstanding
employees, nothing is more powerful than
developing them, preparing them for greater
responsibilities, then promoting them.
- Don't Let Egos Get Out Of Control And Destroy
Everything -- I have made a few observations
about egos and how they affect business. On one
hand, a person who does not have a strong ego will
rarely, if ever, get anywhere. On the other hand,
if someone has a powerful ego, but this ego is out
of control, he or she will create more enemies
than friends and this type of person will never
get anywhere either. We have all heard the great
proverb, "You can catch a lot more flies with
honey than with vinegar." Therefore, CEOs must
keep their egos in check.
- Allow No Politics In The Organization --
You may be thinking, "Nadji, you have got to be
kidding me. Every organization is loaded with
politics." My answer is politics are like a cancer
to any organization and playing politics is a game
played only by incompetents. Experienced leaders
know this and are rewarded with stable
organizations that are not likely to go out of
business. A truly experienced manager does not
allow politics in any organization. Period.
- Must Use No-Nonsense Management Practices --
A successful CEO must keep things very simple and
make it clear to all employees that the bottom
line is results. Those who produce the greatest
results will rise in the organization and those
who do not will not stay in the organization. Here
at TMC, I love nothing more than promoting our
outstanding team members.
- Competent People Are Compensated Well --
It has been said that you cannot hire first-class
employees with second-class compensation. Top
performers are smart people and they know how much
they are worth. It has been my personal experience
that those who make very little money prior to
joining you are not really bargains; they make
little money because they have little to offer. I
recall one year we hired a salesperson who had
been making $17,000 a year in his previous job. I
was extremely reluctant to hire this person
because of that, but the sales manager talked me
into it by saying, "What do you have to lose?" We
hired that person, and after three months, no
sales were made! In short, you get what you pay
for!
- Use The Management By Walking Around
Technique -- This is the best part of my job
as a CEO. I truly enjoy it the most. By going
around and getting to know everyone by their first
name and learning something about their families,
friends or pets goes a long way toward building a
relationship between the CEO and the employees.
Ironically, CEOs always talk about CRM, but very
few talk about ERM (employee relationship
management). Yet, without ERM, customer
relationship management is nothing more than
wishful thinking!
- A CEO Should Be A Door Opener For The Sales
Department -- One of the greatest things a CEO
can do is to assist the sales and marketing
departments to open doors to new customer
opportunities. Believe it or not, most people have
tremendous respect for the high position of the
CEO of any responsible organization and,
therefore, having the CEO around in sales meetings
with customers will produce wonders. To say the
least, the CEO's presence convinces the customer
that you are seriously interested in their
business because most CEOs do not travel with
their sales departments. Trust me, your customers
will be extremely impressed and sometimes honored
to have the CEO included in the sales team. In
short, there is no greater door opener for new
sales and no greater relationship builder in any
organization than the CEO. Unfortunately, this
extremely crucial function of the CEO is often
neglected, whereas, in this slowing economy,
nothing could be more effective than having the
CEO along to reinforce relationships with the
customers and communicating the CEO's appreciation
for the business that the customer provides him or
her all along.
A Word Of Caution -- Taking The CEO Along Could
Be A Double-Edged Sword
Unfortunately, there are egomaniac CEOs who do nothing
but harm if you take them along to meet customers.
Such CEOs only serve to destroy customer relationships
and the company loses sales in the long run.
Unfortunately, employees or sales staff cannot do very
much about taking such individuals on sales calls.
Indeed, I have observed several CEOs who fall into the
outrageous category who actually embarrass staff and
customers and make horrible scenes in front of
customers and as such, they create more problems then
they are worth. If you have a CEO of that type, avoid
taking him or her anywhere. In fact, you have to
question the wisdom of the board of directors of such
corporations that would keep that kind of CEO. Bottom
line, if you are fortunate enough to have a CEO who is
charismatic and compassionate, one who is blessed with
a great deal of empathy and enthusiasm and is
politically correct, take him or her along. There is
no better way to open doors for greater sales and to
reinforce customer relationship management. On the
other hand, if your CEO is of the other variety, you
have every right to say who needs a CEO anyway!
As always, I welcome your comments.
Sincerely,
Nadji Tehrani
Executive Group Publisher
Editor-in-Chief
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