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In the course of considering a position as a CEO, every thing on the list should come up in some form or fashion. The BRC thinks that prospective CEOs should be very aggressive and overreaching as the instant before hiring is the highest negotiating power you will ever enjoy.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Thx.

> In life, you don’t get power, you take power.

Yes, eventually I heard that that is the situation. And, the times I had power, it was because I had taken it.

How to know have taken power? Other people start shooting at you, out of jealousy, competitiveness, fear, etc.! Or if they are not throwing rotten eggs at you, then maybe they think you have so little power you aren’t worth the price of a rotten egg!

The first thing I did at FedEx was write software to schedule the fleet. The CEO, BoD, and investor General Dynamics were pleased, thrilled, really, and a big pile of equity capital and loans were enabled. Gee, I’d just written some software, in a hurry.

Then it started: (1) A guy I didn’t know chatted with me in the hall and ended by saying “Back at my former company in aerospace, there are a lot of people like you.” Just like me? Really. Wow. Dime a dozen, huh? (2) The guy who had hired me declared me his enemy and tried to cut me out of everything.

When I was a B-school prof (didn’t want to be, but was as part of trying to be good to my ill wife), the campus computing totally sucked, the school was struggling about what the heck to do, as a grad student I’d just run a successful computing shop so in the first faculty meeting stood and gave a proposal in a few words. That way, I grabbed some power. Then university CIO started shooting at me. We had a shoot out over some disk drive engineering details in front of my Dean, and I won. A year later, what I proposed was running with me as Chair of the committee. Then I was put on a committee to pick a new CIO for the university. Apparently when the CIO shot at me, some people thought that he made a mess in his pants. Then some more people started shooting at me! My department Chair was totally pissed and declared war on me, when we’d hardly ever even talked. He didn’t like a new faculty member getting visible on the whole campus doing things he didn’t know how to do!

Ah, once I was working on a proposal for our major customer but was sent for a week to try to save a project that was hopelessly in trouble. Hopeless. But I saw a technical gap in the proposal about measuring power spectra of audio signals in the ocean (right, Navy submarine stuff), quickly got smart on measuring power spectra, wrote some illustrative software, called an engineer at the customer, had him over, ran the software, and showed him what the math said could/couldn’t do which were surprising — it was really low frequency stuff, and some of intuition is badly wrong down there. On the proposal, suddenly my work got ‘sole source’ for my shop. So, I’d grabbed some power. Then I got a new job, and the head of the shop got a bit drunk, with my leaving was afraid of his job, and called me trying to get me to stay. In the end, he said that I could resign “with prejudice” whatever the heck that meant! I went on staff at Georgetown U. and also taught computer science.

Later the Navy wanted an evaluation of the survivability of the US SSBN fleet under a special scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea, with results in two weeks. I saw some work by B. Koopman and saw a continuous time Markov process, wrote out the math, typed in the software, ran it, and had the results on time. A parallel project flopped. So, I won and likely grabbed some power. In addition some work in the shop had been doing a lot of digital Monte Carlo work, that is, with random numbers. Well, one of Knuth’s books has some really good recipes for random numbers, e.g., from where they need a lot of random numbers, Oak Ridge National Lab. So, in assembler, I programmed some of Knuth’s recipes. I used those in my SSBN work, and another project also used that assembler code. When they reran some of their old work with my new random number generator, they got materially different results. They got afraid of my contribution, essentially afraid of my power. Soon, I was no longer wanted in the shop — I’d done too well, gotten too much power!

So, to get power, have to grab it. Then, sometimes can get shot at by others, sometimes by ALL the others!

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The product stuff is not something you can immediately impact as the new CEO. This is about taking charge. Transition.

In life, you don’t get power, you take power.

Once you are in charge, you can work the product side of the equation.

When a new President gets his first PDB (Presidential Daily Brief), his whole world changes. The world does not wait for the new American President to get up to speed.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Gee, I saw relatively little on reviewing the products/services that make the money, the customers, who they are, what their views are, and marketing and sales, and I would have concentrated on those.

Gee, how might this apply to Donald starting in January?

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/changing-ceos-process/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com