GigaOM FoundRead: Regardless of the title your company’s top technology executive uses — CTO, CIO, Chief Product Officer or VP of Engineering — your company will ultimately look to this person to produce the software and technical products upon which your business success depends. Through our earlier career experiences (at Quigo, eBay and PayPal), and now through our consulting practice (AKF Partners), we’ve noticed that there are five consistent reasons why a tech executive fails.
Perhaps the most commonly assumed “failure scenario” is that the CTO is simply not technical enough to inspire confidence in the engineering team. This is not the case. In fact, it is actually rare that a CTO is removed because he or she lacks technical acumen. The truth is that your senior technology officer does not need to be the brightest technical mind in the business, except, potentially, during the startup phase of your company. Over time, he or she need only be geeky enough to challenge the strongest technical minds in your company to add value to technical decision-making. Most often, we find that senior executives come to a bad end when they spend too much time relying on their technical brilliance and not enough time cultivating other important aspects of their job.
The Top 5 Tech Exec Failure Scenarios we list below are not mutually inclusive, but they all support one very important conclusion: when technology executives fail, it is not because they lack an individual skill. It is because they lack an an adequate balance of the many technical, operational and leadership skills necessary to make them a complete manager.
5. Failure to Build World Class Team
4. Failure to Execute
3. Failure to Lead/Motivate/Inspire
2. Failure to Manage Operationally
1. Lack of Financial Acumen
F|R: The Top 5 Reasons Tech Execs Fail [GigaOM FoundRead]
Category: Planning & Management
Are you feeling overwhelmed, stuck or do you find yourself procrastinating? Do you typically load your plate by taking on too much and expect to handle it all? Are your goals realistic or a bit too ambitious?
There are times when tipping over your plate and letting things drop so that you can start over is the best choice.
Consider eliminating all goals for 30 days and slowly add back selected old ones plus new ones. Use this 30 day period to delegate, dump, finish, or streamline areas of your business or personal life.
Steps:
-Make a list of everything that is undone or not progressing the way you want. Include things you feel pressured about or anything your feel you should, could, have to, or ought to do. Add all goals, projects, roles, routines, and things you consider both minor and essential to your life. Drop 50% of the items on this list permanently. Yup, you heard me. Creating space to re-evaluate what you really want allows you to make a clear decision about what you choose to add back into your life.
-Deliberately reduce the emotional or time invested in the remaining 50% so that you have some “you” time and space for self –care, re-energizing, having fun…..
-Slowly add only the items back that you really want.
-Clearing your plate of all goals, promises, shoulds, have tos..etc for a brief period creates the room to focus on what you really want rather than what you think you should want or do.
Bottom line: Choosing this strategy can be a great way to realign priorities and assist you in having more ease in your life.
Doing a clean sweep can jumpstart enthusiasm and motivation when focused on the things you deeply desire and choose to pursue. This can be a fun process that supports you in working smarter rather than harder.
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To DIY or not to DIY…
This article contributed by Michelle Ulrich.
To ‘Do-it-Yourself’ or Not to ‘Do-it-Yourself’, that is the Question!
We live in a do-it-yourself society. We want to save money by doing tasks we don’t even enjoy, but are we really saving money?
Take Chef Michael Elliston who lives in Puerto Rico as an example. He hired someone to design his website, but it ended up being a template where he entered the information on his own. His professional image was certainly not improved by his lack of web design knowledge or multiple grammar and spelling errors. That’s when he decided to hire a trustworthy and skilled Virtual Assistant; someone who could visualize and project his professional image in a much better light. He is very happy now and can focus on cooking, which is his passion (and livelihood)!
Michael’s story is the same all over the world. We don’t concentrate on what we do best; we are conditioned by society to do everything by ourselves. What do you love to do? If you are doing almost everything EXCEPT the one thing you love, you are wasting your own time and your potential income on that time.
A few tasks to outsource to a Virtual Assistant: • Bookkeeping • e-commerce – shopping carts • Ezines – online newsletters • Graphic and web design • Remote Office Management
Virtual assistants are truly resourceful. Just ask a VA today about your ideas and even ones you might think are impossible—you’ll be surprised at the results!
About the Author
Michelle Ulrich is the Chief Villager and founder of The Virtual Nation, an educational destination for Virtual Professionals around the globe. Michelle is an avid believer in giving back to her industry and she does this by offering coaching, teleclasses, resources, and tools, in addition to providing a community of learning, a nation of culture, and a virtual village for her members. Education is the foundation of her organization as well as for her own personal and professional development. Michelle has been a community college instructor teaching a Virtual Assistant certificate program online. Aside from coaching and teaching, she is also a speaker and soon-to-be author on the subject of Virtual Assistance. She maintains her private practice where she specializes in working with authors, coaches and speakers who struggle to keep up with e-commerce and new technologies. Clients can check out her services at www.virtualbusinessmarketing.com, while Virtual Assistants can find her over at www.thevirtualnation.com. She can be reached by telephone at (916) 536-9799 in the Pacific Time zone.
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Delegation vs. Abdication
Are you confused?
I was working with a member of my Business Mastery Advisory Board on some issues about her business and inconsistent attendance at her board meetings.
As we talked it became apparent to both of us that we did not know what success met to this individual.
Her conscious mind wanted more money. She associated having more money as a way of having to work less so she could spend more time with her daughter.
Her subconscious mind was telling her that the more you work the less time you will have to spend with your daughter.
So she would work really hard and build a book of business then drop out of sight for a while wonder how she got so busy. What we came to understand was that she had a hard time delegating because of some situations that occurred in her past so she felt she had to do everything herself.
As a result of this discussion we did two things that got her focused and clear. The first was to create a delegation process so she felt comfortable. Many people confuse delegation with abdication. Delegation is knowing the who, what, where, when, and why of the delegation process so there is no confusion. Abdication is delegation without follow through.
The second thing we did is help her prioritize what she needed to work on and what could be delegated. Two months after this discussion we talked and her stress level has dropped, her work load has dropped but she has more business.
The big benefit to her in being involved in the Business Mastery Advisory Board is that she had someone to hold her accountable. Through this accountability process she has made major changes in her life and business.
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Keep On Your Track
Small Business Branding, by Drew McLellan: Have you ever had the experience of driving along, paying attention to something off in the horizon and next thing you know, you’ve driven to that spot? And it wasn’t where you meant to go?
The same phenomenon can happen in your business. Most business owners I met pay a lot of attention to what their competition is doing. We definitely need to keep an eye on the competitive landscape. But there’s a very fine line.
The danger in keeping track of the other guys is that you lose track of your own path. We tend to move towards what we pay attention to. And you don’t want to let your competitors determine your marketing strategy. That’s a quick way to:
* Deplete your resources
* Look like you’re playing the “us too” game
* Lose the momentum of your key messages
You want to be the leader in your industry, not follow someone else. The best way to beat your competition isn’t watching what they do. It’s doing what you should be doing.
If you have and follow a marketing plan — you can enjoy the best of both worlds. The marketing plan keeps you on your course. Heading in the direction you have determined. When you know where you’re headed and keep checking the map to see that you’re on course, you can afford to peek at what the competitors are doing.
Just make sure you’re following your course, not theirs.
Is your competition luring you off-track? [Small Business Branding]