What are the first few things that a new CEO should do upon joining an organization?
Based on what the press is saying and what was discussed on the latest episode of This Week in Tech, the CEO should lay out her near and medium-term plans for the company in some big public announcement/address in order to appease the company’s shareholders. In my opinion, though, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.
Why? Because the CEO’s primary job is not to appease shareholders’ concerns, it’s to fix the company. Yes, the CEO does need to address and appease – and dare I say ‘manage’ – both the company’s shareholders and employees, but the first message he gives them ought to go something like this:
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Followed by, “Oh, and this is going to take a while so don’t expect any results for the next eight quarters or so.”
Meanwhile, that CEO needs to start figuring out exactly what the problem with the company is and how she’s going to go about fixing it. Most likely she’ll already have a pretty decent idea of where to look and who to talk to about it, but she should never presume to know the answers based on her outsider’s knowledge and she should never announce her solution to the problem before she’s even taken the time to analyze the problem in any real depth.
If she does make the assumption that she already knows how to fix the company and is arrogant enough to announce her solutions up-front, then she’s no better than a crappy management consulting firm that applies cookie-cutter solutions to unique and complex problems simply because “that solution worked just fine in the last company we consulted with.”
My point is that both Carol Bartz, the new Yahoo! CEO, and Barack Obama, the new American CEO (a.k.a. President), are doing exactly what a sensible new CEO should be doing upon joining a company. And I’m very impressed that they’re not caving to public/shareholder pressure to announce their reformation plans before they’ve even had a chance to settle into their new offices and figure out what the heck is going on there.