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.
Behaviour in the workplace that tolerate inequity and disfunction breed fear and despair; this erodes trust. In addition to being reprehensible, it also makes companies weak.
Through our actions we can choose whomever we want to be during this time.
When all is said and done, the board really only has two jobs - two buttons they push.
I thought we were not talking enough about things like establishing sustainable moats, building the balance sheet, and service proficiency beyond pure SaaS. These things give your company better options and levers to pull in good times and bad
As a leader, you grind because there is something new blocking you and it’s hard to understand. You grind because the decision in front of you has new risks that need to be characterized. You grind because nothing can be certain and you are not a robot, so you have to spend time with hard things to get your head around them
If you graphed your mistakes vs the quality of the learning from those mistakes - and your successes vs that quality learning? How do you think the two would compare?
… 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
