60-Minute CEO

Mastering Leadership an Hour at a Time

Dick Cross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351862431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Looking toward the C-suite? Take heed. Author and serial CEO Dick Cross pulls back the curtain on this top leadership role, explaining in his new book that being a successful leader, running a business, and doing it extraordinarily well isn't a full-time job. In 60-Minute CEO: The Fast Track to Top Leadership, Cross makes the case that the single greatest determinant of business success revolves around the job at the top. Cross suggests that the most important, and often overlooked, duty for a CEO is thinking about how to improve his or her business and how to be a leader. Cross also reveals that a mediocre leader can be transformed into an exemplary one simply by refining two key things: thinking and character. In Cross's trademark conversational style, he conveys why strategy and execution, while important, should take a back seat to authenticity and responsibility, and that the essential elements of the CEO role can be accomplished in several 60-minute sessions every week. Executives may fill their time with other tasks, but leading and running a company requires explicit skills different from those needed for any other corporate position. The good news is that those skills are easy to learn, fun to do, and not time-consuming. In an entertaining style, Cross offers executives the fast track to the top leadership position. And while 60 minutes may seem like a quick fix, as Cross sees it, three 60-minute sessions a week devoted solely to considering your business and your role as leader are crucial to business and leadership success. In 60-Minute CEO, Dick Cross brings over 25 years of experience of transforming companies in various stages of underperformance into industry powerhouses. Cross combines his knowledge and experience with the stories and lessons of preeminent leaders and thinkers including General George Patton and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson.

Acknowledgments

In the greatest sense this book is not mine. Rather, it is a collection of ideas either given to me directly, or that others placed me in positions to discover on my own, over three decades.

Together these people are all friends and loved ones.

Sadly deceased, Jack Glover, emeritus Lovett-Learned Professor at Harvard Business School, opened my thinking to an intersection between a young designer's mind and business strategy Ross Arnold, founder and Managing Partner of Quest Capital, in Atlanta gave me my first and second posts as CEO of underperforming companies. My dear friend Larry Williams, founder and Managing Partner of The Breckenridge Group then followed with a suite of assignments, including my first post at the top of a public company. My best friend from business school, Peter Lamm, then invited me into the newly formed Fenway Partners private equity firm in New York, and entrusted me with a portfolio of seven companies most of which I ran at one time or another. Then Doug Diamond, Managing Partner at Equity South, placed me in the top spot at CARSTAR, Inc. And most recently, Bob Egan and Rodney Eshelman invited me to join Alston Capital Partners and installed me as CEO of that fund's first acquisition.

Along the way, in the fall of 2010, my friend and accountant Tom Gerety introduced me to Jill Friedlander and Erika Heilman, who signed me as what I will always consider their "against-the-odds" first author in what blossomed into a powerhouse portfolio of thought leadership books. With a jaw-dropping stable of authors, who, uncharacteristically and unreservedly, love and know they are overwhelmingly blessed to be under the wings of their publisher.

And most importantly, my bride of four decades and my glorious daughters, Kate and Hannah. Who unselfishly supported a life of maniacal, missionary travel to save businesses, and who held me mercifully to a promise always to be home for weekends.

Thank you for your Love—the greatest gift of all!

Prepare the Cabin for Takeoff

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain.

I am pleased today to welcome you aboard our Transformation Airlines flight from Mediocre Airport in Averageville to Exemplary Field in the City of Exceptional.

Today's flight will take us over the peak of Too Tall to Climb Mountain and across the far reaches of the Can't Risk It Valley. As we reach our midpoint, you'll be able to see the Plains of Complacency passing beneath us. After that we'll pick up the Zealous Followership Tailwinds to speed us to our destination.

If there is anything that our flight crew can do to make your journey more comfortable, please don't hesitate to ring the overhead bell. It is connected directly to [e-mail], where we are waiting at your service.

We sincerely hope you enjoy your flight. The weather looks good. And after just a few preflight procedures, we'll be under way.

Chapter 1
Unmasking the Myth

These are the facts about how to be great in the Job at the Top. But they're not what most people think.

• Running a business, and doing it extraordinarily well, isn't a full-time job.
• Instead, running a business is an explicit skill that takes dedicated, assiduous thought, and conditioning, and this skill is different from the ones needed for every other job in the company.
• It's easy to learn and fun to do, but it's not taught anywhere except in this book.
• Therefore, many CEOs spend most of their time doing things that have little to do with their highest responsibility, which is running their companies.
• And so they miss the greatest contributions they could possibly make.

On only the rarest of occasions has anyone questioned the following proclamation, which I make at the beginning of most speaking engagements. I believe it without reservation:

The single greatest determinant of business success is the Job at the Top... nothing else even comes close!

Audiences nod thoughtfully, indicating solemn understanding and alignment with what seems to them a near-spiritual truth. What comes next is curious, and perhaps equally predictable. Nonetheless, it's a surprise to everyone else in the room, because it exposes a grand and pervasive charade. And it catches them all in their complicity.

A simple, follow-up question triggers the moment. It's only six words, only one with more than a single syllable.

How do you run a business?

No audience has ever offered a response. From the podium I see chins snap up and eyes pop wide in surprise. Then there's an awkward pause. Attention shifts from me as people look at their shoes, befuddled.

I call this "The Greatest Question Never Asked." And when I ask individuals rather than audiences, I get the same two reactions. One is incredulity, disbelief that anyone would have the audacity to ask a stranger such a thing. As if I'd asked, "How did life start?" or, "What is love?"

The other reaction is offense. This reaction is typified by the guy whose whole face squinches around the narrow slits his eyes have become. His posture is grim as he sits expressionless behind crossed arms. But then, a light goes off! Reaching clumsily for his wallet, he steps forward. And with relief, he pushes a business card triumphantly into my face: "See, it says it right here... CEO. I know how to do that job!"

The fact is that few of us, even those who've been at it a long time and have generated great results, can explain how we do the Job at the Top.

But I can. Not because I'm any smarter than anyone else, but because it's been my conscious obsession over two and a half decades. I'm passionate about running companies and teaching others how to do it. This obsession has even exceeded my interest in generating exceptional financial results. Fortunately, those results have always followed.

The next chapter takes a hard look at the customs we take for granted as "truths" about how to do the Job at the Top. These are things we seldom even consider questioning. But they're also things that we know aren't getting the job done. The chapter addresses directly, not obliquely, challenges we seldom discuss, except in confidence with others who are facing situations like our own: how to motivate our teams to higher achievement; how to move our businesses forward at the pace and with the performance we've committed to. Chapter 2 opens you up to questioning the ideals and the models we've elevated to the status of "natural law" in running our organizations.

Chapter 3 lays out a simple, fresh, and effective framework for how to approach the Job at the Top. It's a zoomed-out version of a road map for getting good—really good—at it in less time than you'd ever imagined. Subsequent chapters zoom back in to give you focused views of more specific headings, food along the trail, and waypoints for your journey.

With chapters 2 and 3 laying the foundation, chapter 4 delivers the punch: how to do the Job at the Top better, more easily, and more joyfully than most of us ever have imagined it could be done.

The best way to read this book is to take your time and fully digest the next three chapters. Read them carefully because they set up everything that follows. You may even want to read them more than once. Stop from time to time to ask yourself, "Is this really sinking in and making sense to me?" Absorb the material until you have no trouble recalling the simple principles laid out and seeing the key points in your head.

Then you can just browse through the rest of the book and pick any chapter that captures your imagination. Perhaps a specific chapter addresses a situation you're currently facing. Or you might feel compelled to read straight through. However you decide to approach the 60-Minute CEO, spending time with this book will deepen your thoughtfulness and your understanding of how to perform exceptionally well in the Job at the Top. It will coach you on how to refine your skills. And it will show you how to talk about the method and how to teach it to other people in your company, in your church group, or maybe even in your family.

My greatest hope is not to wow you with some great new theory Rather, it's to bring into your consciousness things you probably already know deep down inside. Those things make sense to you the instant you read about them. But you seldom think about them in any disciplined way nor do you spend time building them explicitly into the way you approach your job.

It's easier than you think. It works. And it's fun. Good luck!

Chapter 2
Softening Up the Beachhead

Here's the setup for what's to come and why I believe it. The fact is that I have yet to find a business school curriculum that includes a course titled: "How to Run a Business." Sure, there are plenty of courses on how to do every other job in the company: marketing, sales, human resources, plant management, procurement, and the rest. But there's not a course for the Job at the Top.

Why not?

Because the Job at the Top is the omnibus responsibility. It's the umbrella that covers everything a company does. Asking for an answer to an all-encompassing question like "How do you run a company?" covers so much ground that our reflex response shifts us into a Newtonian "parts-to-whole" rather than a "whole-to-parts" way of looking at the world (more on this later). This channels us into the way Western culture approaches just about anything that's complex... we disaggregate a complex thing into its subparts with the idea that if we can understand the parts, we will understand the whole and how it works.

It follows, then, that two years in business school spent scrutinizing the subcomponents of businesses will come together one fine day in June, resulting in the graduate knowing how to run a company! If you're one of those unfortunates who has gotten a job running a company just after that glorious June day, you know one thing. That's a lousy idea!

Regrettably, our only other route to mastery in the Job at the Top is to spend years, maybe decades, working for others—who probably aren't very good at their jobs—and figure it out that way! I say, good luck!

This book offers an alternative. It addresses the whole of the question, "How do I master the Job at the Top?" with a prescription that, at first glance, seems like heresy because it runs counter to the Newtonian way of thinking. But also because it creates a big stain on a considerable backdrop of precedent and upon the model on which we've imprinted, one our fathers and grandfathers brought home with them from their experiences in the Second World War.

Jack Glover, managing partner of the Cambridge Institute (my first management consulting firm), the Lovett-Learned Chair at Harvard Business School, and my favorite mentor, described it this way:

The strongest influence on a manager's style is the style of the first manager he served.

So strong is our need, at that early, uncertain stage of our career, for a model of someone we deem successful that we tend to imprint, as Jack would say, on our first boss. And in the early 1940s nearly every able-bodied person aged eighteen to twenty-four experienced his first model of organizational authority in the military And with that model, they won a war!

It should come as no surprise, then, that a whole generation of young men and women, returning from victory and ready to launch their own careers and lives, ran their businesses and their families according to the principles of command and control. Nor is it surprising that their kids would imprint on those methods. Then their kids, and so on.

But the model you're about to read breaks the string. It flies in the face of nearly everything we've learned about how to do the Job at the Top from our predecessors. But it works. And it works better than the old model, these days. And it comes just in time.

Just in time? Yes. Because today we are four generations away from the precedent set in World War II. That's enough time for the original imprinting to fade. And enough time for new societal mores to arise, including unprecedented expectations for individual self-worth versus material worth and individual choice versus blind subservience.

With these events, the command-and-control model has outlived its time. Obsolete along with it, most notably, is the central idea that the person at the top is supposed to "control" the organization by simple virtue of the authority vested in the position. A corollary is that control comes through the premise that the person at the top knows more than anyone else about the business.

Among the underpinnings of the new model, the one that works today, are these:

• The Job at the Top is no longer to control, but rather to enable.
• The Job at the Top is no longer to make decisions, but rather to foster great decision making in all the other parts of the organization.
• The Job at the Top is no longer to demand performance, but rather to instill zealous drive for performance in everyone else.
• The Job at the Top is no longer to enforce constructive behavior, but rather to inspire it.

Ever find yourself asking, "What's wrong with younger people these days? Particularly the gen Xers, gen Yers, and, oh yeah, the millennials? Why aren't they more like we were at that stage of our careers? We were glad to have a job and willing to do just about anything to keep it and advance?"

The next two chapters offer a framework for answering those questions.

Chapter 3
The Big Idea

It would be too great a stretch to present what you're about to read as science. Because the data was collected serially and in an undisciplined way over a twenty-year period, it can hardly be considered a controlled experiment. Also, you can't verify the product with statistics. But for me, all the data points line up, and together they explain a lot about what works and what doesn't work throughout the course of a career. Now I want to share that understanding with you.

Through my speaking and consulting, I've learned that there are lots of others—maybe even you—who are in the same boat I was, lacking confidence in the job they're doing. And they really aren't in a position to evaluate their pluses and minuses against any standards other than purely financial ones. No other standards exist for the Job at the Top. This leaves us to proceed hoping that we are doing a great job. But it also leaves us carrying deep concerns that we might be doing better. That's an admission we can't discuss with anyone. Not our reports. Not our investors or bankers. Usually not even with our families and friends.

So, my intention is to help you see over the gunnels. I'll offer you relevant and reliable reference points for how to do your Job at the Top—and how to do it well. These points may help you advance your methods, and will certainly give you a greater degree of comfort at the helm. But you are not the only one who will feel the good effects. Your increased comfort level will cause others to feel greater confidence in your leadership, as well as greater satisfaction that they are part of your organization.

One of the jaw-droppers I deliver in my speeches—and one with which everyone agrees once it's out—i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prepare the Cabin for Takeoff
• Climbing Through 10,000 Feet
• The Captain Has Turned Off the Seatbelt Sign
• Touchdown
• Index
• About the Author