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Book Review: What The CEO Wants You To Know
21 Plays6 years ago
This week's episode is about a awesome book that I read called What The CEO Wants You to Know! This book is good for CEO's or those who want to be CEO's and employees!
If you're interested in purchasing the book click this link: http://amzn.to/2GskMTk
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Recorded, Produced and Edited by: Éliane Anita
Track Produced by: Devo Beats
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Transcript
Introduction to Monthly Book Review
00:00:22
Speaker
Hey guys, welcome to the Aelion Anita podcast. I'm your host Aelion and I'm so excited to have you join me for today's show. And now you guys know that I am an avid reader and reading is one of my favorite past times. And so I decided that once a month I would do a book review on one of the books that I have been reading in that particular month.
Setting Reading Goals for the Year
00:00:42
Speaker
I have a very small reading goal this year because I have a lot of projects going on, so I didn't want to make a huge commitment to read. Even though I read all the time, I was like, I'm just going to do something small, something that I know I can obtain or I should be able to obtain. I'm going to read 24 books this year, which breaks down to about two books a month. I am meeting the expectation of that and I'm excited about
Key Book Concepts: Customer Satisfaction to Profitable Growth
00:01:10
Speaker
it.
00:01:10
Speaker
And today I'm going to talk to you about this book that I read called What the CEO Wants You to Know. It's written by an author called, his name is Ram Chardran. And so I'm going to put the put the description and a link in the show description if you are interested in looking out checking out this book. Hopefully you are because it's a it's a really good book. So I read this book from the
00:01:35
Speaker
standpoint of an employee and I also read it from the standpoint of a CEO because I do have my own company and I am an employee currently and I also volunteer in a lot of different areas so I wanted to read it from several different um standpoints because I wanted to learn as much as I could from this book. So what I'm hoping to do is talk to CEOs that listen to this podcast and also people that are employees
00:02:02
Speaker
that's looking to you know maybe get promoted or try to get into a maybe you're getting into the workforce and you want to you're looking for the right company that fits your skill set. So if you understand some principles about each company or how every company operates you can really furnish and grow in any company that you get yourself into. So this book is broken down into four parts.
00:02:28
Speaker
The parts goes as following. It is part one, the universal language of how business is. Business acumen in the real world is part two. Part three is an edge in execution and part four is your personal agenda.
00:02:45
Speaker
So part one talks about how businesses work. What is the universal language of each business? And it basically comes down to these four core values or these four core pieces. The first thing is you want to satisfy your customer. So you need to make sure you know how your customer makes or what makes your customer come back to you. Why do your customers shop at your store or buy from you or shop on your website? What is it that the customer want?
00:03:15
Speaker
The next thing you need to know is how your company makes money. So whether you are a CEO or an employee, you need to know how this company makes money, what brings in the capital for this company. The third thing you need to know, or the third thing that you need to do for business is to get a return on your investment. So you want to make sure that you are investing in things that make sense, whether it's an employee or a piece of equipment,
00:03:42
Speaker
You wanna make sure that you are buying or spending capital on things that makes sense so that you can get a return on your investment. And the fourth and final thing is you wanna grow and you wanna make sure that you're growing profitably. So you don't wanna just add people to the team, let's say if you're buying or if you're trying to hire an IT person. You wanna make sure that you're hiring and you're growing your team in a way that not only makes sense but that it makes money for your company.
00:04:12
Speaker
So it doesn't matter if you're working for a Fortune 500 company or if you're working for just a small company or a small business, every company works the same way. And if you really want to be an asset to your company, you want to know how they make money, you want to know what their customers buy, you want to know how you can get returns on investment, and in what ways you can grow profitably.
Team Involvement and Breaking 'Us vs. Them'
00:04:36
Speaker
You wanna make sure that you keep things, keep products if you're in a business of selling things or if you are clientele based. You wanna make sure that you're either keeping product or you're offering services that customers want. So you have to know what your customers need. So you have to be fluent in what your customer needs and wants. So every company is only successful. You know, you think about the Amazons and the Targets and the Walmarts of the world.
00:05:03
Speaker
those companies are only successful because they understand what their customer wants. If for any reason they decide to do what they want and now what the customer wants, guess what? They're going to lose business and the customer is going to find somebody that offers them what they want. So you want to make sure that you're in that business.
00:05:22
Speaker
You also, too, you want to bring your team together. CEOs have to think this way because a lot of companies have this us versus them mentality. So you have the higher up staff, which is probably like the CEOs, the presidents, the vice presidents, supervisors, managers, whatever. And then you have the staff that actually makes the company go. So you have maybe the people that work in a factory or the people that work in a lab or whatever the case may be.
00:05:51
Speaker
these are the people that produce and so it's like them versus us but when you bring everybody to the table and give everybody the same kind of information and the same kind of knowledge you build a camaraderie within the within your organization you help your employees feel like they're a part and you also give your employees opportunities to voice their opinion it's a statistic that's going around um he actually mentioned it in the book he said how millennials are turning down opportunities to
Teaching Employees to Think Like CEOs
00:06:20
Speaker
work for
00:06:20
Speaker
Fortune 500 companies and pre-existing companies to start to work as startups just because they want their voice to be heard. They want to be a part of the creation and the building of a company. And so if you listen to the language and the voice of a millennial nowadays and they ask you or you ask them, what do you want to do or what are you passionate about? And they always say, I just want to make a difference.
00:06:45
Speaker
I don't want to just go to work and spend my time doing the same thing over and over again. I want to feel like I'm a part of something that's making a difference so they don't care if it's picking up recycling or if it's actually
00:07:00
Speaker
building, I don't know, like the next greatest software, they just want to be a part of something that's going to move the world forward. And so if you give people opportunities to voice their opinion and you bring them to the table, what you create is a collective intelligence. So you get to have the opportunity to hear every voice because you just don't know who has the answer that you're looking for. And it not only
00:07:26
Speaker
I love this piece that he talked about in the book because he talked about how you should teach your employees to think as CEOs and entrepreneurs. You don't just want them to just be regular employees and as an employee you don't want to just be a regular employee. You want to think
00:07:41
Speaker
If this business was mine, what could I do? Now that requires for you to have a passion and a desire for the company that you work for. So if you don't, if you're not passionate or if you don't have a desire to work for this company, it's probably best that you move on and find the company that really suits you and fits you well because this is where you'll flourish and you'll give your best.
00:08:05
Speaker
But you want to make sure that as a CEO, if you are a CEO or if you're in any kind of leadership that you are offering your employees the opportunity to think as businessmen and businesswomen. When you have a finance meeting, you should bring everybody to the table because everybody should know, one, how the company makes money and two, how much the company really has because
00:08:29
Speaker
The minute you exclude one department out of one piece of the company, they start to feel like, hey, maybe we're not important or maybe we own our own separate island and we can do our own thing.
Financial Strategies: Liquidity and Inventory
00:08:42
Speaker
The thing is you want to bring camaraderie within your team so that when it's time to make moves and make decisions, you're making decisions based off a well-informed meeting or a well-informed opportunity.
00:08:56
Speaker
You want to keep that in mind when you're making decisions as far as your company. So you want to make sure that you have collective genius there. The next thing he talks about is how cash is king. You want to make sure as a business you don't have your money tied up in inventory or you know maybe you don't have an inventory but you don't have your money tied up in the wrong places because
00:09:20
Speaker
When it's necessary, when you have to make moves of any kind, you need to have the money available. So when you have an inventory, a large inventory of things, because we think, oh, if we have inventory, we'll never run out and we can always sell and all of this stuff, but that ties your money up. So if you need to buy a new piece of equipment or if you need to invest in a software or if you need to invest in security systems or whatever the case may be, you can't do it because your money is tied up in your inventory.
00:09:50
Speaker
your inventory is literally money sitting out on the side. So you want to make sure that you don't have your money tied up in things like that. And you want to make sure that you make adjustments to things that don't work. So let's say if you find out that, you know, maybe you're selling toilet paper and tissue, right?
00:10:14
Speaker
and you find out that your customers really buy a lot of toilet paper from you, right? But they every so often may buy paper towels. You will end up having to put the paper towels on sale just to get them out of inventory and lose money
00:10:29
Speaker
instead of stocking up on paper or toilet paper. So you want to make sure that you make adjustments. If you sell more toilet paper, carry more toilet paper. And you can apply that rule to anything else that's in your business. So as an employee, you want to ask yourself for your company.
00:10:46
Speaker
Am I making money for my company? Is what I'm doing profitable for my company? The second thing you want to ask yourself as an employee is how does this impact the cash flow? Now again, I tell you again, you have to be passionate about your company to ask yourself these questions. A lot of times people are just not passionate enough to ask these kind of questions because they're like, hey, I'm just here for a check.
00:11:12
Speaker
So if you feel that way, you might want to find a company that does not, or you might want to find a company that you value enough to ask yourself these questions, but we're going to pretend like you love your company enough to do it.
Sustainable Growth and Workforce Investment
00:11:25
Speaker
So you have to ask yourself, what am I doing and is it profitable for my company?
00:11:29
Speaker
Another thing that you want to keep in mind is that you want to grow in a profitable way. Now I know we kind of discussed this in the beginning of the podcast, but growth does not equal success. Let's take for instance Amazon. Amazon is probably one of the leading companies in the world right now.
00:11:47
Speaker
And Amazon is investing a lot of its money and a lot of its capital into its employees, i.e. like their software engineers, their IT people and things like that because their mind is future focused. They're thinking about what could we do to take the customer experience to the next level. And so they are adding these kind of people in there and investing lots of money into getting the best software engineers, mechanical engineers and so forth and so on.
00:12:15
Speaker
in the right places because they know what they're trying to build and that comes from having a company vision so when you begin to build your company or if you're looking to expand you want to make sure that you're growing and that you're adding to your company in a profitable and in a sustainable way.
Henry Ford's Employee Strategy
00:12:33
Speaker
Now, the people factor is very important to your company because your people is what builds and makes your company. So for instance, Henry Ford, back in the day, he created a way where his employees could afford cars. So people thought that he had lost his mind. So what he would do is he paid his employees much higher than what people thought he should, but he paid them at a very high rate.
00:13:02
Speaker
And then he dropped the price of cars and people were like, you're going to kill your company. That's so dumb. Why would you do that? You're paying all your money out to your employees and then you have such low prices for cars. You're not going to make the money up. But what his employees started to do was they said, OK, now that we have enough money to take care of our household needs, now we have extra cash to buy a car.
00:13:24
Speaker
And now we can buy a car from our employer because it's cheaper than any other car that's being sold. So what Henry Ford did actually was create a market for his cars. And so by treating his employees right that not only charged them with passion and dedication, but it also had them to begin to talk about how they enjoy their work.
00:13:47
Speaker
So when you think about when you love what you do you start to talk about it to your friends and your family which makes your friends and family curious and they want to shop or they want to buy or they want to look into the experience that you had. So you think about a company like you know when a mainstream company hits the
00:14:05
Speaker
hits the scene and you find out that they're treating their employees wrong, you tend to be like, I'm not buying from that company because they don't treat their people right. But when you find out that they actually love their employees, they do right by them, it makes you more compelled to shop at their store or shop at their company or do business with their company. So you want to build the kind of company that people will talk about to their friends and family so that they can build a market for you as well.
Brainstorming and Setting Priorities
00:14:32
Speaker
So that's another good piece. And I also talked to you earlier about the collective intelligence when you bring everybody to the table, you get ideas that you never thought that you would get. So if you're having a finance team, you might get an idea for the marketing team that can actually save a lot of money that can keep the company afloat.
00:14:50
Speaker
So you want to make sure that everybody is well informed about where the company is, the status of the company, how much money the company has, and you will never know what comes out of those kind of meetings because it is a such thing as collective genius.
00:15:08
Speaker
Part two, he talks about what priorities should be for the company. So a lot of times, employees cannot voice what the priorities of the company is. So you need to make sure that your employees know what are priorities for this company. Your priorities should never exceed three priorities because if you do, you start to steer the focus away from what the company does and how it makes money.
00:15:35
Speaker
So you want to make sure that you base your priorities based off how the company makes money. And every employee should know it and every employee should be able to repeat it at the drop of a hat. And when you have these three priorities, it tells you where the business is going and it tells employees where to devote their time and energy into.
00:15:58
Speaker
It's okay to be different and another piece that you need to do is not look backward. Start looking forward to the future. If you made a mistake as a CEO or if the company dropped the ball, it's okay. Clean up the mess and move forward. You want to keep in mind that you want to focus on the core. What makes our company great and what keeps our customer coming back for more?
Clear Vision and Execution
00:16:20
Speaker
Part 3, he talked about execution. So execution is basically putting the bat in the hitter's hand. So you want to take all of these ideas that you may have curated in a meeting with everybody at the table and you want to begin to execute.
00:16:36
Speaker
So this is the place where you put the right leaders in the right position. You want to make sure that everybody is in the right seat doing the right thing so that your company can actually execute what you say you're going to do. So when you think about Amazon, right? And you think about Amazon Prime and the kind of energy it takes to get two day shipping, right?
00:16:59
Speaker
They guarantee you that if you order this product two days later, no more than two days later, you should have your product at your door. You have to think, who has to be in the right position and who has to be in the right seat to ensure that this gets executed? So when you start to think about your team, you want to put the bet in the hitter's hand and make sure that the right people are in the right place to make sure that this is being executed properly.
00:17:28
Speaker
And part four, the last part was talking about what can we do as a team or as a people to advance the company. So as a CEO, it is your job or if you work as an employee, it is your CEO's job to communicate the vision of the company.
00:17:46
Speaker
you need a clear crystal clear vision of what this company does, how we make money and why we're here and how we exist, right? And what we want to do, what we want to offer. So that is the picture of the company,
Employees as Integral Puzzle Pieces
00:18:00
Speaker
right? Once you have the picture, you have to start to see yourself as like a part of the puzzle piece. How do I make this picture complete?
00:18:09
Speaker
How can I add with my skills, my talent, my time, my energy, my education, my experience? What can I do to advance the causes of this company? That's where you come in. That's where the nuts and bolts come in for you to start to think, how can I become an effective piece to this puzzle?
00:18:30
Speaker
That is the book and it talks about it in this.
Final Thoughts and Recommendations
00:18:35
Speaker
So that is the book of what the CEO wants you to know. It is a really, really good book. I hope I did a good job at explaining it, but this is, it's a really great book for anybody that is a CEO or anybody that is looking to become a CEO, anybody that's on the advance.
00:18:53
Speaker
in their company, or just somebody that wants to be a better employee that wants to add more to the table. So I think that I would recommend this to every CEO to read, honestly, and I would recommend this as curriculum for every employee to read because
00:19:09
Speaker
It's important as companies that every employee and all the managerial staff get on one accord so that you can move your company forward. If you're interested in knowing more about this book, you can email me at alienanitashowatgmail.com. You don't have to email me to just ask me about the book, but you can email me and ask me questions if you want.
00:19:32
Speaker
If you're interested in more about this book, I'll put the description and the link down below in the show notes so you can check it out there. And if you're interested in following me on any kind of social media, I am on everything. I am alienated there, so if you want to find me, follow me, like me, whatever, you can do so on any social media, I'm there.
00:19:52
Speaker
Um, I think that's it guys. So thank you for tuning in to this podcast. If you like it, share with your friends and followers, I will greatly appreciate it. And as always be blessed and stay relevant.