Show notes
In this episode, we end our discussion on Leadership and Management: we delve into how to execute; explore values systems, including our own; and share our core beliefs.
Navigation:
Intro (01:34)
Section 1: How to Execute (02:08)
Section 2: Culture & Values, Our Core Beliefs (20:11)
Conclusion (34:57)
Our co-hosts:
Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt
Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro
Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news
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Intro (01:34)
Bertrand Schmitt
Welcome to Episode 32 of Tech DECIPHERED, our second and last episode of this series on leadership and management. In our previous episode, Episode 31, we focus on defining leadership versus management. We spend time talking about the different styles of leadership management. In this episode, Episode 32, we are going to focus on how to execute and how to create and build the right culture through the right values.
Section 1 - How to Execute
Nuno Goncalves Pedro
How to execute, how to do this? What are the levers that you have to lead and to manage?
Bertrand Schmitt
I would like to share one perspective I've got, what the CEO's job? I'm talking about a company at some level of scale, obviously not five people, ten people team, but we're talking about 50 people plus type of company. What's your job at scale? I believe that you have to have on one side a deep vision, clear vision. You have to bring your team on board.
You have to either keep convincing your existing team, bring new members on board, evaluate existing ones, and you have to manage the cash, because if you run out of cash, that's a big problem. In a way, there is this metaphor of being like the bus driver. You have to view outside of you, you have to let people in, sometimes, unfortunately, let people out, and you have to keep the gas. If you don't do all these three, at the very least, that's big trouble for the business.
As we discussed, if you are a tech organization, specifically a tech company, you probably need to be as well a product CEO. But at the very core at minimum, you need these three vision, bringing a team, managing cash, as the key pieces of the game as a CEO.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro
Agreed. I would make a caveat here, which is my view on product CEOs in tech is they are the most dominant type. There are other types that work well, in particular in the B2B environment, in business-to-business. The more commercial-driven CEO, the person who has extreme experience in sales or in business development or corporate development. We've seen a few of those people doing very well in B2B.
Again, by nature, tech product CEOs do relatively well. But in B2B, certainly I think we've seen great examples of amazing CEOs that, honestly, are not that technical. But they are very good at selling and they're very good at doing a bunch of other things. There's a few people that come to mind, but again, not to get any hate mail, I will not go into details.
I agreed fully with your vision, Bertrand, and the metaphor is very accurate on the bus. The job of the CEO has several dimensions to it as well. Effectively, a CEO needs to manage for the long term and for the short term, and when managing for the long term, strategy comes into play. A set of integrated actions that leads to competitive advantage. Normally, you measure it in years, two to five years. It's something that is really far in the future.
You have tactics. Normally, tactics is something that you think through as more the one to two year things. It might be a big initiative, a big product launch, something that is neither four or five years from now, but certainly not something that we're going to get done this year. You need to think through how that is done and then serve the classic final pieces operations, which is the one month, three months, six months, one year, we need to get this done. What are we doing in our day to day and how are we thinking through this?
In some ways, the CEO role is very difficult because of this, because it is a little bit of a necessarily paranoid role where you're always looking very, very far ahead and trying to think about two to five years, how big can this be and how can we scale, et cetera, but at the same time, you're thinking about right now and what happened today and how can I compete and how can I go and do this, et cetera.
What makes this particularly difficult is time allocation, for example. How do I allocate my time? I remember having clients at McKinsey, one client in particular, I won't name them, but one client that one day turned to me and said, "I envy you." I said, "Why do you envy me?" This guy was CEO of an organization. He said, "I envy you because you have time to actually think about my business."
I was like, "Wait a second, you're the CEO of this business. I'm a consultant. I'm leading a team of consultants working on projects, engagements for you. How can you say that?" "I went to my calendar, and I would estimate that, at most, I have 15 to 30 minutes a week that I get to actually have thinking time about my business.
Normally, I'm just basically 80, 90% firefighting crap, stuff that happens, that just goes across whatever. I get maybe 5% more on managing stakeholders, board, customers, clients, whatever, in a more proactive manner. It's not so much firefighting, more proactive, whatever. Then there's very little time left for anything else. You guys, in whatever three-month engagement that you're doing, for me, will have more time to think about my business than I did in the last six years."
In some ways, I know he was exaggerating. This was not a badly run organization, just to be clear. Sometimes you do work with badly run organizations. It was just a very large organization where the CEO, at the end of the day, his role was just tough. It's tough to think strategically when you don't even have the time to do it.
Bertrand Schmitt
It was not just on being you because you were young and handsome. That was for other reasons.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro
I was young back then, I'm not sure I was handsome, but it was many kilograms ago. How is that handsome?
It shows the difficulty of the role. For example, one thing that I always do when I have leadership roles in different organizations is I carve out time to think. I put time in my calendar. I'm extreme calendarer as many people have told me. I put time in my calendar on a weekly basis to actually just think.
I create situations in which I think. I create situations where I can be in my backyard overlooking the ocean and I think, I can create situations in which I go to a place that is particularly pleasant to me, like drinking coffee or whatever, to think. To be very honest, a lot of my best ideas in terms of forward-looking strategic elements and even sometimes even operations, like day-to-day stuff that were not cracking.
Some of the best ideas come during those moments where your brain just creates the space to not have the day-to-day biases. The bias towards an action that comes after another action. The bias to say maybe this is the wrong way, maybe we should just change this. I think having that discipline, the discipline to create those spaces is very, very important.
Bertrand Schmitt
Yeah. To double down, because it's an important topic, sometimes I see people who tell me, "Oh, I only have time for the tactics." I think it's a big mistake. You absolutely need to do both. When I say you need to do both, if you are the CEO, maybe you are stronger on one side or the other, but that's why you have to build a team and work out all together.
Ultimately, you need to spend enough time on the short-term view, running the business, operations, and the long-term view. What does it mean? Why are we doing this? What's our strategy? How are we going to get there on the longer run? You have to combine both. People will tell you they can do only one thing or the other. They don't have time. You have to make the time to do both well.
Strategy without tactics, you are going to die pretty quickly if you don't have the execution right. If you just have the execution right, you are going to run very fast to a cliff or to a wall. Both don't work. People have to really get that to build a great and maybe even a good organization, you need absolutely both. You need to get right both. Not negotiable.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro
I studied with Professor Burgelman at Stanford back in the day, and he wrote this book called Strategy is Destiny that formed a lot of my thinking around strategic planning. I had a variety of strategy roles in my career, and in some ways, I always thought the title of the book, I told him this, shouldn't have been Strategy is Destiny, but Strategy is Direction. Probably less sexy of a name, I guess.
Strategy defines where you're going to, to shoot to find North Star. A lot of people think about strategy as beautiful charts in a slide deck. It's not that. Strategy, as I mentioned before, is an integrated set of actions that leads to competitive advantage, right? There's actions for strategy.
For me, tactics then becomes a little bit the pillars, the building of the core pillars, the present ones and the future ones. Then operations, to your point, is the building, it's getting stuff done. It's, "Okay, how do we now move this?" That's how I look at these three dimension, strategy, tactics, and operations put together.
One other topic is the whole topic of, and we've already addressed it a little bit, of breadth versus depth in the CEO role,...
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