Mark Attila Opauszky
I have been a Canadian tech CEO for over 20 years. There are always obstacles; some of them are worth it. I want to share what I can.
… the trickle-down effect for start-up and growth stage companies quickly over-distilled into “not paying enough attention to profitability”. In fact, profitability became a new fashionable catch phrase. Somehow, as long as we all mixed in more daily dialogue on this important new discovery, or nodded knowingly when someone else did, we would sound smart. Smart enough feel safe from the bottom falling out while continuing to pursue game-changing valuations.
Trust is nice, but I can't rely on it, mutual assured destruction is better.
Finding even small hits of joy in tasks you otherwise don’t prefer or even dread is widely powerful. It's worth saying that your joy is not anyone else’s responsibility but your own; you need to work at it. And things will never be 100% pure joy, so don’t expect that either.
Without this principle solidly anchored in leaders’ minds, the resulting plan will at best be an elegant balancing act of compromises. Compromises that will yield compromised results. In other words, a lot of activity and no clearly bankable progress; a lost year.
Clearly, this head of engineering is alarmed, and that alarm is presumably coming from a concrete problem or problems. But instead of communicating the problem(s), their communication is being spammed by dramatic and hyperbolic statements
The most terrible lesson I learned was simple but profound: over time, inevitably, pain will change you.
People struggle to be brief because they are afraid of being misjudged. What presenters forget, is that the person you are speaking always has to repeat It to otheRa
Real leadership is a constant work in progress and to push forward you have to hunt for the things you personally are bad at seeing.
He was raging that the second year billing hit his credit card “without permission”. He goes onto justify that “ … we are not even using the product...”
The new consultant (or new CTO or new product head} sighs and looks you strait in the eye and says: “Quite frankly, this product is really fucked up and needs to be re-architected …
“That’s bone, right?” I croaked. The skin on my lower leg was gone, same with the back of the upper leg; the muscles in many parts were gone too.
It has been my privilege to hire many fully formed adults; and whether they were 23 years old or veterans, they made all the difference.
Hundreds of decisions get made every week that need to incorporate positioning; otherwise the business can feel unpredictable, rudderless or just plain confusing.
Nowadays missing revenue targets is often blamed on poor sales and marketing alignment; and it’s probably true.
I like to think of the things you build a company with (the foundational blocks) as the First-Class Objects of your business. The main investments viewed through the most pragmatic lens possible. Without these, your business is not durable and your successes along the way likely prove to be short lived.
