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.
Pain is a natural consequence of being alive and having ambition. Pain is the universe doing you a favour
You have the better mousetrap, yet customers churn and use the budget to go in some other direction.
One of the great lies we as CEOs tell ourselves is that the problem is real and product is a great fit for our addressable market and we are just an iteration or two away from scaling like crazy.
Knowing what is real is more important than winning, because there is no sustainable victory without it.
A big part of being a CEO, executive or team leader has to do with how well you manage the psychology of the job. Psychological resilience, durability, empathy, clarity are critical if you are going to try to keep important goals in focus and get an organization of humans to do the right things.
The failure to focus started and ended with a failure to clearly synthesize a view of the reality around you
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?
