What CEOs don’t ( generally) mention in their memoirs?

A successful CEO generally writes a book. After all, success begs to be decoded & chronicled. Even when it is a resultant of several favorable intersecting events & circumstances, successful CEOs find ways to back-fit it into a sexy Point A to Point B narrative. They’ve earned it after all!

An unsuccessful CEO often writes a book too. After all, failure needs to be denied or justified. Even when it is a resultant of their own ineptitude & lack of foresight, unsuccessful CEOs find ways to attribute failure to reasons beyond them, criticizing a predecessor & writing off a successor.

No matter which of the above groups a CEO belongs to, what his or her book doesn’t talk about is the surround story, the little bits that added up into building of or crumbling of an edifice. This is especially applicable for the second group, not necessarily as an exclusion by choice, but rather because of?the inability to overcome one’s own blind spots & to spot telltale signs that their ship was sinking on their clock.

Last year I wrote a short blog post on this subject that connected with a huge audience & got shared around hundreds of times over on different platforms. I have since then, received several requests to elaborate it?(it was a microblog then) into a full-bodied article, possibly with anecdotal evidence. This is my attempt to do that.

If you’ve studied any large organization & its fall from glory, you might connect with the following clues that show up but are often missed by or brushed under the carpet by the leadership.

1. Too much camaraderie: Camaraderie is great. Till it is not. One of the first signs of a sinking organization is sprouting of ‘clubs. These are cozy groups whose members find each other & agree on an unspoken rule of symbiosis. They are forever promoting fellow club-members & never asking tough questions of each other. But just because a pigeon closes its eyes, it doesn’t mean that the cat disappears. These tough questions start piling up. Till a day when the closet breaks open & the skeletons tumble out.
2. Buzzwords & fads: It is one thing to stay abreast with trends & learn from them. And it’s an entirely different thing to fall for trending buzzwords & import cheat sheets that work elsewhere & try to force your organization into the same. What follows is that the work that was already being done well, now needs to be dressed up into the cheat sheet because the CEO loves it, thus encouraging duplication of labor & infusing inefficiencies disguised as workflows where none existed. What’s even worse is that no one dares to question such fads. Because unsuccessful CEOs, though unknown to themselves, are bullies in denial & who don’t like being challenged. Employees of such organizations saunter into their cubicles every morning, sometimes unable to recognize the person in the next cubicle, thanks to their leader having gotten sucked into some fad like WFH or flexi-work, fed to him by a smooth-talking consultant with a French beard.
3. Too much compliance: Again, compliance is great. But only as a deterrent to mischief. It can also be a major hiding place for ineffective employees & an excuse to snub growth. Bad CEOs create an atmosphere of fear & control. While such an atmosphere can check wrongdoings only in part, it kills creativity, risk appetite & a sense of healthy entrepreneurship in employees who know they will be rewarded for ‘not screwing up’?rather than be celebrated for hitting the ball out of the park. Such CEOs & their teams?never?play to win.
4. ?No monster bosses: I know, monster bosses suck. And we need checks and balances in the system to weed out sexists & racists & bigots & bullies. But not the highly driven go-getters who take your organization to the top of the heap. Failing organizations, taking refuge in fluffy HR jargon, find ways to stigmatize & discourage even rightfully ambitious leaders & brand them monsters because they make the dull herd uncomfortable. Soon the bench starts leaking & the adrenaline drains out. What’s left is a delusional CEO with a team of laggards & yes-men (women).
5. Red tape: Successful CEOs & their teams below love boundarylessness. They break silos, dismantle walls & kill bureaucracy. Unsuccessful CEOs carve a culture that’s just the opposite. Neither are they approachable themselves, nor do they promote approachability as?favorable behavior. Such organizations are trapped in ‘bands’ and hierarchies where tone supersedes content & where good intent fails to flow down?the ladder while good work fails to get shown up the ladder. And yes, leaders here, especially senior leaders, find it below their dignity to respond to communication from below.
6. Internal focus: When you read books by?unsuccessful CEOs, you’ll see how much they were trapped inside their cocoons. They’re all about themselves & their own little universe. And if at all they mention competitors, they do so with a sense of highhanded disdain. And when such CEOs were on the job, they also built teams that were clones of their own personalities. Seldom, if not never, is the subject of competitor strengths deliberated upon in internal meetings. The leadership, drunk in unsubstantiated egotism, turns a blind eye to the market. And sooner or later, the organization starts getting bombed from all corners of the marketplace.
7. Meetings: Then, some more meetings. Then, meetings to summarize past meetings and meetings to plan future meetings. This sounds like a Dilbert strip, but that’s the organization that unsuccessful CEOs build. An assembly of robots flaunting packed calendars & who’re forever running from one meeting to the other, neither questioning the logic of such meetings, nor failing to?drive any decisions through them. The worst thing is, these endless meetings in failing organizations are extremely well-attended, meaning that the employees also do not realize that these are a waste of time. Or maybe they have given in to what Martin Seligman called ‘Learned helplessness’.
8. Personalities: What no unsuccessful CEO acknowledges in his / her book is the prevalence of a personality culture that they promote. The organizational leadership model & the go-to-market strategy is designed to accommodate pre-selected personalities rather than the other way round. And soon you have a top-heavy colossus in your hands that comprises of a bunch of useless men & women with inflated egos draining the company coffers.
9. Bottom line shortcuts: Unsuccessful CEOs invariably promote smart accountants over business drivers. And soon the organizational philosophy gets centered around cost reduction rather than business expansion. They obviously find nice fads to box such initiatives, but they end up creating a team that’s incentivized for counting pennies rather than doubling the business. There’s also a lot of management spending extravaganza in the first quarter of every year & headcount cuts in the last quarter to meet numbers. Such CEOs, sooner or later, also fall victim to ‘creative accounting’?practices & end up selling the family jewels to keep the quarters going.
10. A flat attrition curve: Somewhat a corollary of Point # 4. Unsuccessful CEOs often take pride in having flattened the attrition curve, mistaking long employee tenures for loyalty when in reality it actually means that the average employee is just rallying around a flag. Successful CEOs grow leaders who are poach-worthy. Unsuccessful CEOs grow leaders who have no takers in the world outside.
11. No sense of tribe: This is an antithesis to Point # 1.?Unlike the selfish camaraderie of unsuccessful organizations, employees in successful organizations have a deep sense of tribe. They understand the human beings in their colleagues, they know each other’s families & they are often seen hanging out beyond work. Unsuccessful CEOs fail to infuse this in their teams. They create organizations that are cold & impersonal, but which pretend to be ‘professional’. And like human psychology insists, when it’s battle-time, unless your soldiers are fighting for each other, you aren’t going to win.
12. HR with an?H?missing: You might have seen the HRMs in organizations led by bad CEOs. Disengaged men & women who kiss up & kick down. They have no genuine interest in employees & work out of a checklist to tick rather than touching & empathizing with the person inside the job title.?Worse still, as the organization silently hemorrhages, it’s these HRMs who always find escape routes while the average employees suffer.
13. Soft causes: Unsuccessful CEOs love soft causes that sound politically & morally correct. Such causes which should be?default behavior?for any organization, suddenly assume the form of some kind of crusade. The CEO & the leadership team then ‘goes to war’, championing these causes and using these causes as excuses for lack of growth & margins in the businesses.
14. The erroneous circle of priorities: What no unsuccessful CEO writes in his or her memoir is that they created an organization that was a blind & self-obsessed Goliath that never saw the Davids coming. They created commercial leadership out of sycophants who in turn created sales teams that spent more time inside their own offices rather than in the customers’ offices. And they handed the reins of control to a bunch of internal auditors who brought about a culture of repetitive reviews & where finance managers, instead of doing finance management, were busy making PPT charts for their bosses’ reviews with their bosses.
15. French beard consultants: Bad CEOs make a lot of friends in the consulting industry, people who ensure the regular supply of buzzwords to keep the boardroom distracted. These consultants are also favored with drawing out the marketing strategy for the organization, thus mystifying & complicating an activity that needs to be organic & bottom-up rather than jargony & top-down. Later, these consultants also help ‘spread the word’ when their friends write books, hailing them as martyrs.

I know, it’s a long list! ???But then, it takes a lot of effort to bring down a great organization. Do you agree?

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