05/09/2017
The information below is only for CEOs.
It is combined only for those who act!
Don’t click read if you are not an executive.
Over the past 20 years, CEOs have undergone many changes due to globalization and technological change. Perhaps nowadays CEO's or Chief Manager's portrait is significantly different to compare with the one that was 15 or 20 years ago. So, can we call it a new profession? To some extent, YES, and that’s lead to a necessity to adjust to a new environment.
In this post Dan Matsui the CEO of Growth Counselor, E-commerce and Startup adviser shares 4 technologies that are not so often mentioned, however, play a significant role in organizational success.
Dan says - “There are plenty of information throughout the internet regarding personal characteristics such as leadership innovative approach, ability to motivate, demonstrate curiosity, inoculate optimistic vision, etc. Also, top manager is a clear thinker who can simplify strategy into specific actions, makes decisions and communicates priorities to the team.
However, there is not so much information regarding "must have" knowledge and technologies. During my career as a CEO, I've noticed that there is a list of must have skills that often CEOs are lacking. This knowledge along with personal characteristics form the tool kit that enables manager to launch and grow businesses successfully”
So based on our research and work with hundreds of organizations, we distinguished four skills of Senior Leaders who are capable to create organizations or launch a new business.
Resource analysis - It is actually one of the cornerstone things you should be keen at. The resource analytics is the methodology to reveal your potential capabilities. In the other words, it helps you to visualize and realize what you have right now. It is all about what you know and have here and today. Starting from 19th of 20th-century resource analysis is playing the very hit role in corporate structure because it is proven that successful combination of resources leads to a very high probability of success.
It is much easier to create the right positioning of your corporation on the market based on resource analysis and of course recognize corporate points of difference
In literature, you may find the various meaning of this term, meanwhile, in the technology company the most important areas for analysis are :
Intellectual capital: This will include brand names, reputation, client databases and business systems, intellectual property and any other technologies that make the process efficient
Human resources: This will include the number of existing employees, future staff requirements, training and development, demography and skills level, as well as the level of loyalty of key employees
Financial: For example existing funds, new funds, incomes and turnover
Physical: For instance machines production, marketing, sales, R&D and technical, in case of technology firms all types of testing environment/labs etc
MVP or the minimum viable product (MVP) is a product which just has enough features to test the idea and to provide feedback for future steps.
A huge amount of businesses and entrepreneurs spending years and thousands of dollars to create a product and after a week on a market, they realize that the initial idea was bad. It was wrong. It was a mistake. It is not going to fly. They lose money time and confidence. The truth is that using the MVP methodology they could have tested their idea in a week or so.
So the core skill is to know how to separate the main advantages and functions from secondary. The right sense of a minimum limit of efforts that you should apply to test the idea without spending any additional penny is really important. On the other hand, this approach leads to a very dramatic decrease in time-to-market, which is vitally important when talk about experiments and hypothesis evaluation.
Market tests. Surely, there are plenty of marketing agencies offering your firm all kinds of services related to lead generation and traffic acquisition. However, there are very few of them that are qualified to work with a product, goods or business on the early stage. One of many reasons is that new and innovative ideas, products or markets require more research efforts, opposed to popular market strategies implementation.
So, the chief manager or CEO should master a wide range of marketing instruments to be on the same page with marketing professionals to set the right frames of the market experiment, as well as to understand what could be expected from the certain instrument.
Scaling up strategies. There is no straightforward answer how to scale up a business and nobody will present you X or Y strategy that will have 100% SUCCESS. The hype-strategy in today's business includes 3 steps: prove your hypothesis, create a live prototype and raise money.
The truth is that not every business needs significant investments to scale up and more over often additional money lead to an increasing level of chaos.
The core CEO’s skills are to see clearly where to apply efforts to multiply income significantly, raise just enough money and not turn growth into chaos. Although this idea sounds simple it is a rather challenging issue which requires a bunch of skills in addition to the extensive experience. Great CEO should not only understand how separate departments are working but picture how all of these things fit together in the 'system', moreover be confident regarding the accurate point when requires to throw all resources and effort.
CONCLUSION
To be clear, there’s no tool kit that modern CEOs should have. There is no magic list that works for every CEO position. However, the mentioned above approaches can really help you to increase your efficiency.
