Lesson #19
Pot Stirring 101—The Key to Continuous Reinvention
As a founder and former CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I have given more than 1,000 talks and speeches over the past 25 or some years. I am invariably asked the same question during each presentation's question-and-answer session: What is a CEO's most important role in an organization?
The audience doubtlessly expects a pat, textbook-type response—“building a team,” “accelerating sales and profits,” or “increasing shareholders' value.” And all of these truly are critically important objectives, each of which provides a barometer of effectiveness and success.
However, my answer to this age-old question was—and still is—“A boss's job is to stir the pot.”
I personally disdain the status quo. The trite saying “If it ain't broke, don't fix it” sets me off. The comment “Same old, same old” when applied to a business's progress is, as far as I'm concerned, the first sign that a company is heading into obscurity. Getting a start-up venture off the ground with some modicum of success can lull an entrepreneur into a dangerous mind-set where he or she begins to relax a bit and starts “smelling the roses.”
One of the truly fun aspects of being a boss is that, at times, you get to make up certain rules of exploration and engagement. You establish the goals, create expectations, and determine measurements. You also get to keep thinking about better ways to do what's already working. Yet one of the biggest threats facing small, medium, ...
