Focus on the road, not the wall. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.
Don’t Punk Out and Don’t Quit
As CEO, there will be many times when you feel like quitting. Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend Alfred
Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls the torture Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their initiative, business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, I didn’t quit.”
In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy and wrong versus doing what’s lonely, difficult and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified a thousandfold. Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company. Over the past 10 years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting anew company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been. l
Share with your friends: |
