Leadership Lessons from “Market Mover” by Robert Greifeld
Dr. Tongjie "TJ" Zhang PhD, CISSP, ISSAP, CISM, GICSP, CEH, CTAJ, ICD.D
![Dr. Tongjie "TJ" Zhang PhD, CISSP, ISSAP, CISM, GICSP, CEH, CTAJ, ICD.D]()
Dr. Tongjie "TJ" Zhang PhD, CISSP, ISSAP, CISM, GICSP, CEH, CTAJ, ICD.D
Cybersecurity Leader ? Board Member ? Community Volunteer
- People First. You can’t predict the future, but what you can do is ensure that you have the best people in place so that when the world changes around them, they can adapt, respond, and step up.
- Transparency Builds Trust. If you tell people what you are about, right from day one, it builds trust in your leadership even when you are making tough decisions.
- Promote Before Your Recruit. If you’ve been doing your job as a leader, you should be developing most of the talent you need in-house. Look carefully at your existing people before hiring from outside the company.
- Encourage Healthy Debate. It’s necessary if you’re going to hear what you need to hear in the decision-making process and take into account all the important perspectives.
- Seek Honest Feedback. Leaders need to counteract people’s natural inclination to make reality seem rosy by seeking out and incentivizing honest feedback and creating explicit avenues for its delivery.
- Prioritize Your Time to Get the Greatest Leverage. The CEO’s task list is endless, but time is not, so choose those activities that give maximum return on time spent.
- You Can’t Do Everything Well. People sometimes think the key to success is doing your job well, but for a leader, it is equally important to know what you’re not going to do well and what you’re not going to do at all.
- Run to Problems. Face reality relentlessly. Override the natural instinct to turn away from the things that are not working.
- Develop Your Leadership Instinct. Find the right balance of experience, knowledge, data, and advice that works best for your decision-making process.
- Don’t Underestimate Market Transitions. To win in the short term, you need to compete well against other players in your market, but to win in the long term, you have to get out ahead of major shifts in the market itself.
- Buy the Winners. There’s no shame in using smart acquisitions to gain much-needed market share or technology, even if you pay a premium in the short term.
- Sometimes You Have to Break Your Own Rules. A good leader can be flexible as circumstances demand - even knowing there will be trade-offs involved, and what’s right today won’t be right tomorrow.
- Today’s Outsiders Are Tomorrow’s Establishment. Don’t ignore those on the fringes of your business ecosystem - they just might be creating your future.
- Build Your Brand Through Affiliation. Your customers are often your best brand customers.
- Not Every Sale Is a Cost-Benefit Analysis. Human choices are driven by multiple factors, some personal, some tribal, some transactional. Take the time to understand what really makes your customer tick.
- You Don’t Win a Customer Just Once. Great customer relationships need to be tended to and constantly renewed.
- Don’t Feel Like You’re Above Politics - None of Us Are. Learn to work with it and use it to increase your competitive advantage.
- Lobbying Is Education. It’s an opportunity to get important perspectives on the table to legislators and regulators can actually make informed decisions.
- Politics Has Its Own Schedule. Don’t pin all your hopes for success on swift changes in law or regulation.
- Know Your Stakeholders. Sometimes a business has unconventional stakeholders that are critical to achieve success - politicos, regulators, VCs, community leaders, investors, etc. Build those relationships early and often.
- Dealmaking Is Never Personal. It’s easy to get caught up in the high drama of negotiation and let it cloud your good judgement.
- You Don’t Get Paid for Passivity. You won’t succeed at every deal you aim for, but in business you have to be audacious at least some of the time.
- It’s Never Black-and-White. The best dealmakers try to see all sides of a deal and understand what constitutes a win for the counterparties. They embrace the complexity and the inevitable compromises and find their way through to a workable outcome.
- Leverage the Mothership. When growing through acquisitions, stay close to your core strengths and be aware that the risks increase as you move further away - in size, culture, geography, or primary area of focus.
- Effectiveness Before Efficiency. Make sure you have a good business and know how it really works before you try to streamline it into a highly efficient one.
- Always Be a Player-Coach. Stay connected to the business on the ground even as you keep your eye on the big picture.
- Incentivize Matter. Understand the importance of employee incentives and build compensation to match. Employees who have skin in the game tend to be more engaged with the success of the whole enterprise.
- The Future Doesn't Always Look like the Past. Beware the trap of predicting what’s likely to happen only through the lens of what’s come before.
- Trust Is Delicate. Business is fueled by competition, but it also depends on trust and cooperation. It’s too easy to take that for granted - until it fails.
- A Public Company Is Always for Sale. If it’s being run inefficiently, sooners or later someone is going to take notice and realize they could do a better job.
- Occasional Failure is the Price of Big Dreams. In business, as in life, when you dare to reach high, some disappointments are inevitable.
- Let People Go with Grace. If you cultivate real leaders, it’s likely that a certain percentage of them will move on. It’s not a failure; it’s a sign that others recognize your success. Be gracious and supportive - you never know how your paths will cross again.
- Take the Heat. Sometimes a leader needs to step up and be the public face of a mistake.
- Don’t Gloat over Victories or Obsess over Failures. While you’re celebrating your success or licking your wounds, your competitors are eating your lunch.
- The Right Approach at One Moment Is Not Necessarily the Right Approach at Another Moment. What once was a success strategy can later become a liability.
- The Best Response to Crisis Is Innovation. Don’t spend too much time defending your mistakes. Talk to you customers directly and improve your products or services.
- Once Your Achieve Competency, You Must Battle Complacency. When the business is under threat from market forces, the motivation to improve comes naturally. When the threats are vanquished, you need to find new ways to encourage change and innovation.
- Don’t Worry About the Slope; Worry About the Trend Line. Significant change takes time. As long as you’re headed in the right direction, it’s less important how fast you are going.
- Carve Out a Safe Space for Innovation. In a cost-conscious culture, it’s hard for innovation to take root. Make sure there’s a dedicated space in the culture, the budget, and the institutional structure for new ideas to germinate and grow.