THE DREAM IN ACTION

Last night I had the pleasure of having an extended conversation with the CTO of GE Healthcare, Nevin Zimmermann, about CEO’s and what they are able to accomplish with a given company. We talked about the past CEO of GE Healthcare, Joe Hogan, and the current CEO of GE Healthcare, John Dineen, and their differences. He explained to me that certain leaders are great at leading during certain periods of time in a businesses life. It has to do with their individual leadership styles. It was no secret that Joe Hogan was a phenomenal growth leader taking the business from $8-12 billion to $17 billion in annual revenue, huge growth! But, now that the business climate has changed significantly there have been leadership changes. These changes in leadership styles are essential as a business moves from a “boost profit” mentality to a “cut costs” mentality. No doubt this attitude will switch back and forth, but that is what is required for business growth.

This corporate lesson is a great one for start-up CEO’s. Many times the start-up founders find that they are great at “founding” but not as great at running/growing a company. Many find that they enjoy that starting phases of a start-up but don’t enjoy the growing phases or the process implementation phases. This can be difficult for a start-up founder who is used to having control over almost everything that company does, and now has to begin to give up control and ‘trust’ others with their company. This first starts with the realization that the entity that they have created is now larger than them and that they must act in the best interest of that entity over their own best interest.

Certain leaders are “one trick ponies” in that they can only start, only grow, or only cut costs, but cannot find those other leadership styles needed to lead through multiple business environments. Sometimes that is ok in the corporate world, and sometimes that is ok in the start-up world. After all Larry and Sergey passed Google off to Eric Schmidt when they realized they needed somebody with the business and leadership experience to lead Google into the next growth phases. They made the right decision and it worked. The most important thing is for the start-up founder to be self aware and realize who and how they are as a leader. For a founder to say, “someone else would do this job better than I would” is a very difficult thing, but sometimes it needs to be said for good of the company.