How to be a successful CEO

RK GOPAL NANDURI.

This article provides 12 key action steps for CEO's of leading for-profit companies to propel their BUSINESS to the next level and achieve greater financial success! These steps are modeled after the real world activities of many of today CEO's of successful US companies. A bit of satire too? You be the judge. Please note, this article does not offer instructions on how to become CEO.

1.

You are no slouch; you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You are better than almost everyone else alive today. Heck, you probably don't even put on you pants one leg at a time, but you still have to set key priorities. In setting priorities, consider who you need to make / keep happy. Shareholder and board members are two of the most important groups. Identify your key clients and key investors. Find out what they want to achieve, and set those as mission critical goals. Certainly your employees provide the products and services, but you are their lord and master. You lead and set the pace! Employees are like replaceable parts, but you are the what makes all the machinery work!

2

After setting priorities, you should develop targets for:

* - Sales and revenue growth
* - Cost Containment
* - Target stock price

Remember, the size of your bonus depends on how well the company performs. Your base salary of a million (or so) dollars is chicken feed. The company has to do well for you to cash in and earn $25 or $50 million.

3

To Achieve the sales and revenue growth, the company will have to stretch. Work hard to lure in new clients and SCHMOOZE them! Golfingexcursions at pricey resorts, tickets to the Super bowl, or business conference in the Virgin Islands are all excellent opportunities to win new clients. The actual delivery of goods and services is not the most critical element of signing new business deals. When it comes to signing up new clients, image and charisma are the keys!

4

Speaking of image, you are spending a lot of time face to face with clients, investors, and the media. You must look and feel great!! It is a business necessity. If you are getting older or grayer or fatter ... then you need to fix those problems. Get plastic surgery to lose some of the wrinkles, hire a physical trainer, get a tan (a light tan), do whatever it takes to look youthful and be energetic. Consult with your account and tax advisor on whether these expenses may be deductible or not.

5

Now it's time to focus on cost containment. It's not cheap to woo new clients and keep schmoozing to retain the existing ones. You must contain costs! Look within yourself and really look within the organization. Are there inefficiencies? You better believe it! Start by putting in place a travelfreeze and a hiring freeze (of course, neither are applicable to executives). Send out a memorandum to cut office supply purchases by 50%. Spin-up an employee action committee to insure that the only materials which are printed, are those with an absolute business necessity for marketing or retention purposes.

6

To stay ahead of the competition you must focus in on labor costs. There are probably way too many middle managers. Time to close ranks and cut the fat! Make sure you are leveraging offshore labor to the greatest extent possible. It doesn't matter that Joe Smith in Indiana has been a great business analyst for 25 years, he costs too much! Go for Jidal Sidahri in India, he costs only about a third of what Joe costs. You do have to be careful though not to offshore work that is regulated to be performed by a citizen, it is critical to avoid legal headaches and bad audit findings.

7

By now you should be winning new deals and reducing labor costs. It is important to make your US and European employees feel that it pains you to layoff jobs in those countries. Make sure that you look and sound empathetic to them. Of course you aren't one of them, but you can't have them all walk out on you at once... well, maybe you could, but it would look bad in the press. So, don't go there. Hold lots of employee town halls, and explain to them that these steps are necessary to drive down costs. Remind the ones who are left that we are all one team, and we must work harder than ever to achieve success.

8

Another way to cut costs is to start to review office space usage. Are there some floors that could be emptied out, and the employees moved elsewhere? Better yet, there may be some entire buildings that can be shutdown. Also, not every employee needs a cube. Encourage your workforce to become more mobile and try to get more of them to work from home. Be careful here though. Make sure that employees working from home will pay for their own Internet access and long distance charges. Set those as stipulations in the mobile workforce agreement (where legally viable).

9

Have you reduced Health and Medical Benefits yet? Well, better late than never. This step is easier than it seems. You move your employees into plans with deductibles and provide some preventative health incentives. You will need HR to produce a lot of material explaining how employees can achieve cost savings by managing their care. The material should show scenarios explaining how the average family comes out about the same on the new plan as the old plan.

10

When times are tough, the and the tough must get tougher! The tough part? Pay cuts, company-wide! Consider paycuts of 5 to 10 percent for all employees. Your employees are probably over paid any way. Executives must take a larger percentage cut in base salary, but don't worry about that because the bonus is what you are interested in. This move should really help to further lower overhead, so you will more than make up any lost salary with the ballooning size of your bonus.

11

The morale of your workforce may be a bit bruised with all of the change that has been happening. Consider firing up some employee recognition programs. These may inspire some employees to work harder and smarter. It doesn't even take a very big carrot to get them moving. Offering small cash incentives and written praise and recognition can get salary employees to put in a lot of overtime. You will be amazed at the increased productive.

12

By now, you should be seeing some significant stock price and profit growth. This is the best step of all, cash in! You've worked hard for perhaps two or three years. Time to pull the rip cord on that golden parachute! Alternatively, you may consider trying to find another company to buy the company you are running. This is where the big payouts can come from ... sometimes $50 million or more. Make sure to pat yourself on the back for all your efforts, because remember ... you are worth every penny!