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Growth CEO Vs Turnaround CEO
Almost every company is a real life experiment which is led by a CEO who determines them. You never know what is going to come out of the experiment. Leaders who build these companies are hoping that the experiments play out in their favour. Once an experiment is found to work, more and more money is spent on the same experiment in order to grow the business.
At times, companies get into a bad…
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Welcoming Ms. Mayer, Yahoo’s new boss, to the exclusive Turnaround CEOs club.
I welcome Ms. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new boss, to the exclusive club of the Turnaround CEOs.
Some years ago this month, I was five months into my first Turnaround CEO experience.
The exchange rate for 1-day as Turnaround CEO is 3-days of rapid growth phase CEO and 5-days of early-stage phase CEO.
And there is more to it! 1 out 3 days of early-stage, and 2 out of 5 days of rapid-growth CEO tenures are occupied by problem solving; whereas every single day of every single day in Turnaround CEO tenure is crises handling and fire-fighting.
Here are some of the of things I compacted in the first year of my first turnaround CEO journey - with that not only we saved our company but we brought it back as the undisputed leader of its space in the US.
1) KEEP THE CUSTOMERS: I got in airplanes and visited all of my big and/or key customers (dozens of big customers spread in 40 out of 50 states in the US) at their C-level to tell them “in person” to stay as my customers and give me six months to fix things. Some of those trips would be in a plane flown by my vice chairman, covering 3 to 5 major US cities in 2-3 days visiting 5-9 customers. And in once such trip we almost landed on the lake instead of the runway in Cleveland during a blizard.
2) PEOPLE/CULTURE CHANGE: I moved the “entire” company from one city to another in another state a thousand miles away! I had to let people go; lots of good people and top-notch talent go. My conscious follows me to the day and will do so until the end of my time. I could found no other way, for the company to have a future (not just survive), a big future - it had to get away and start from scratch, total clean slate.
3) FIND NEW PURPOSE: The hardest challenge I faced was not in convincing customers to give me a chance or shake hands and say good-bye to the people, on the contrary instead it was to change the thinking of the entire company about what we stood for and hence why we have to “abandon” the existing product. And the best time we had together was that (after we passed that initial shock) to find our new destiny together.
4) COME UP WITH A KILLER NEW PRODUCT. And out of all that turmoil and happening during my turnaround journey, I realized almost instantly that the future we had was in re-inventing ourselvelves around an innovative new product by utilizing all the finest qualities we had yet my rivals lacked. In my case it was delivering our value prop as what would then be one of the earliest cases of SaaS delivery of SW.
Every day and each day in the annals of a Turnaround CEO is the play ground of ying and yang.
Dear Marisa I welcome you among us. May the force be with you and Yahoo.
