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The New Leadership Toolkit: From Potential to PerformanceSpecial Guest Rob Tarkoff of Oracle Joins The Miles Group CEO Stephen Miles and COO Taylor Griffin to Discuss Lessons Learned from the Downfall of SBF and Other Silicon Valley Trailblazers "We've been awed…by the charismatic founder who breaks all convention. We forgot that there are some fundamental things that have to be in place for a business to truly be successful and scale." – Rob Tarkoff NEW YORK, Jan. 17, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- To succeed in today's business environment, says The Miles Group (TMG) CEO Stephen Miles, "you have to have the toolkit to be performance-driven…This ambidextrous nature of executives that we're looking for must combine a potential-driven mindset –inspiring, motivational, passionate – with the performance-driven aspects of bootstrapping and doing more with less."
In "The New Leadership Toolkit: From Potential to Performance," the episode of C-Suite Intelligence out today, special guest Rob Tarkoff, EVP of Oracle, joins hosts Miles and Taylor Griffin, Chief Operating Officer of TMG, to discuss why we have been so enamored with enigmatic, overconfident, youthful CEOs. "We've been awed...by the charismatic founder who breaks all convention. We forgot that there are some fundamental things that have to be in place for a business to truly be successful and scale," says Tarkoff. He explains that the excitement around unicorns – startup companies valued over $1 billion – and other "exotic animals" drove investors to make astonishing bets. "Boards, executive teams, CEOs are starting to see that being the exotic animal in the zoo is not the answer anymore. Now it's about just tried and true metrics around profitable growth, discipline, financial management, clear product, milestone delivery, and all the things you know that we find boring," says Tarkoff. Griffin points out that "people do what they're incented to do, naturally," referring to the at-times conflictig goals of hitting targets vs. driving the company to a lucrative payout. "They're not held to any true performance metrics, and there's no incentive to drive it to that level of discipline," says Tarkoff. "There's nobody minding the store." "The positive of this is that the customers win. Experimentation is expensive and hard to do in a performance-oriented culture. And because of that excess investment, a lot of great products were developed by sophisticated engineers and companies. You can think of innovations today that we use in our consumer life like Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb – lots of these companies would have never been built if it wasn't for the availability of investment capital," says Tarkoff. But in order for these potential-oriented companies to thrive long-term, "there will have to be a reevaluation of the company, as well as a reevaluation of executive capability," says Miles. "There are times when youth, hubris, and inexperience matters. And there are times when experience, discipline, having had a few knocks, and having traversed a few difficult situations matters," says Tarkoff. "The ambidexterity – that's the challenge." Tarkoff says he's looking for "quality of product and quality of team…People who can help bring these potential-oriented companies into this performance-oriented era…you have to overcome the vestiges of excess." "The New Leadership Toolkit: From Potential to Performance" is out now on all major podcast platforms. New episodes air every other Tuesday. Listen and follow on Apple, Google, and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information, please contact Davia Temin or Trang Mar of Temin and Company at 212.588.8788 or [email protected]. About the C-Suite Intelligence podcast About The Miles Group/TMG About Rob Tarkoff
SOURCE The Miles Group/TMG 
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