What Future CEOs Are Taught at Harvard

Recently, we held a discussion among CEOs at Harvard about their various insights. The questions were well thought out and interesting, and we came away with a great deal of valuable information. Here are my thoughts on the questions discussed at the meeting.

The first question was how to begin a career as a CEO.

1. If you are starting out as CEO with little time and need quick results, begin with quick wins. This is the period of top-down decisions. Whether the CEO comes from inside the company or outside it, as long as you have no followers and no people who share your values, only directive decisions made without discussion will work. But they will work only for a very short period, and the method is justified only if the company is in crisis. If the company is doing well and needs a transformation to make its next leap, start with strategy.
2. Write a new strategy or update the current one. You need the right indicators for assessing your performance, and you need navigation for where to go: sometimes external factors can affect a company more than your own performance, and it is then hard to prove to shareholders that you were effective. Strategy is more about goals, values and culture; the rest is tactics.
3. Three elements are essential for implementing major change: strategy, team and culture. Strategy tells you where to go, the team executes the strategy, and culture makes that execution as effective as possible.

The second question concerned effective communication and how to avoid falling under the influence of distorted information, rumors and speculation. This requires the following:

4. Every team manager should have a dashboard tied to their KPIs, and so should the CEO. This helps you stay on top of what is happening.
5. Meetings should follow these rules: - they are held regularly; - materials are prepared in advance and shared with participants; - criticize in private, praise in public.
6. A flat management structure reduces the distortion of information in both directions.
7. Deepen your technical knowledge, so that you can speak the same language as your subordinates.
8. Employee incentives should be as transparent and clear as possible, and should not change often. Incentive pay should reward only what the employee can influence. Once the rules are set, you cannot change the incentives based on actual results; otherwise incentives will stop working as a tool.

The third question concerned culture: what the main areas are for changing it. In my view, culture is one of the key elements of sustainable development. If a company wants to grow over the long term and not be dependent on its CEO in the future, it has to change the culture itself.

9. Culture starts with the leader. Employees watch the leader, and if one thing is declared and another done, trust is lost. It is also worth understanding that employees often copy the leader's behavior, and this then becomes habit.
10. To change a culture, two things are enough: 10–15% of employees become evangelists of the new culture, and 10–15% who do not accept it leave the company (voluntarily or by dismissal; it makes no difference).
11. A flat management structure helps introduce cultural change in the company faster.
12. Bring in new people from outside to provide fresh blood that will introduce new cultural values.

The higher a person's managerial position, the more attention should be paid to soft skills. Horizontal and vertical growth within a company should be separated, and horizontal growth should not put people at a disadvantage. More generally, developing large companies is a complicated business, and it is not always easy to judge the effectiveness of each employee and each action. Strategic changes may pay off much later, and, conversely, the ineffective decisions of a previous team may catch up with the new leadership down the line.