Managing Growth

From the CEO's desk - How all top CEOs drive great business growth and still have all the time in the world

The founder of eAltius spent almost a decade as a journalist interviewing top CEOs around the world and studying some of the best run companies. He realised all top CEOs had one thing in common that gave them the uncanny ability to have great control of their business while also having all the time in the world. He then found a very simple way for others to replicate this ability of highly effective people. This discovery is revealed here.

by Neshan Dias

The sign on his desk said “CEO – the buck stops here”. This was no ordinary CEO. This was Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems - a legend in Silicon Valley who steered a company from start up to Fortune 500 in record time.

Yet he shared something in common with all other good CEOs. He seemed to have plenty of time. In fact he seemed to have all the time in the world to sit and chat.

It didn't make sense. It appeared that the lower the rank of the employee the less time they appeared to have, or the more busy they appeared to be. And here were these CEOs who generally had pretty huge agendas, yet always seemed to have time on their hands. Why was that?

The answer turns out to be very simple
The top players share two things in common. They know exactly what their top priorities are. And they are all capable of visualizing how all the multiple facets of their business come together.

This gives them the uncanny knack of knowing what they need to keep their eye on and what knobs to turn by how much. Then they can leave the detail to the army of lieutenants hired to manage the detail. Of course they know when and how to dive deep into the detail when their lieutenants need help.

Three keys to all business management
At a high-level, there are only three key knobs the top brass are looking to keep a close grip on. These are growing revenue, cutting costs and building competitive advantage.

They are constantly evaluating which ones are the most important things to do of all the million things that everyone puts in front of them. And usually, those that get to the top of the pile are the ones that the organisation has the least amount of control over and have the biggest impact from a revenue generation, cost-cutting or competitive advantage perspective.

Then it's a matter of managing plans to address these priority issues. So as long as the CEO is comfortable that plans are in motion to get top priority items under control, he has plenty of time to deal with the people who make all this happen. And that at the end of the day is the most important element. Hence they appear to have plenty of time.

So the question is how do we all do that?
After studying business for over 15 years, eAltius designed a very simple technique to map any business and its priorities on one page.

From this point forward, the leader and the team all know what everyone's priorities are and they also are able to visualize the entire business by sharing the same picture. This literally puts everyone on the same page and working in a concerted effort.

It also keeps people focussed on the task at hand and gives people a way to ensure all new tasks are prioratised in a systematic and logical manner. The best part of this is that it puts onto one page what is usually only in the head of one person or worse is scattered in the heads of many people.

It's like having a radar screen for your business where the screen shows you what the key priorities are and also gives you a blue print of how the business is held together and where it is going.

How complex is this process?
Depending on the size and complexity of the business, it can take between two days to two weeks to map an entire business on one page. It took us two weeks to map a multibillion dollar business and identify the company's top business growth priorities.

When we shared this map with the company's management team, everyone got it and everyone agreed. This was quite a surprise considering that most management teams don't always agree on what the priorites should be.

For more information, click here…