What is the purpose of this article?

• The audience for this article is corporate leadership (i.e. boards of directors, C-Suite, and controlling shareholders).
• The focus is on the characteristics of corporate leadership talent which maximizes the chances the chances of your company failing (i.e. going out of business or providing poor returns to investors).
• This article can also be viewed as a checklist of talent characteristics your corporate leadership should not have.

This is the third article in a series:

#1 Your company will fail i.e. go out of business or provide poor returns to investors.

#2 Why will your company fail? i.e. your corporate leadership is not superior to and differentiated from your competition.

This article does not provide tax, legal, or financial advice.

You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

You can download a PDF of this article from: Is your company planning to fail V4

Ensure that your corporate leadership core components of talent are significantly below the median of your competitors.

The core components of talent are:

#1 Self Awareness

There are two types of self awareness

• Internal self-awareness: Leadership doesn’t clearly see and understand themselves. They don’t understand their competitive strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities.
• External self-awareness: Corporate leadership doesn’t understand how others (customers, employees, shareholders, society, etc.) view them.

#2 Character

• VME (Values, Morals, and Ethics. Employees, customers, and society perceive that corporate leadership lacks integrity, and has poor value, morals, and ethics. The decisions and behaviours do not reflect what the published and documented VME.
• Courage Don’t have the courage to make the right decision. The right decision is often not: the cheapest, easiest, lowest risk to the company, lowest risk to you, and not what everyone else is doing.
• Don’t have perseverance, especially against all odds.
• Don’t know when to stop persevering. When they are digging themselves into a hole, they keep digging.

#3 Relationship skills:

• Corporate leaderships lacks the ability to create and sustain a network of personal relationships inside and outside your company.
• They have limited persuasion and negotiation skills. They cannot manage different points of view and interests.
• They cannot create and maintain committed followers .

#4 Communications

• Oral and written communications is poor. The messages that people perceive are very different from the messages corporate leadership intended to broadcast.
• Corporate leadership has poor listening skills. Do not listen to customer, employees, society, etc.

#5 Crystallized intelligence

• Corporate leadership had limited knowledge of historical events, thus does not prepare for those events and is surprised by those events e.g. Labelling as “black swans” pandemics, wars, liquidity freezes, etc.
• Lacks current relevant knowledge e.g. customer needs, employee needs, technology, ways of thinking, paradigms and methodologies.

#6 Fluid intelligence

• Corporate leadership is unable to solve problems if they don’t have past experience with the proble.
• Makes decisions about the future, assuming that it will be the same as the past. E.g. customer needs, competition, employee needs, etc.
• Assumes that the future can be predicted. Unable to create scenarios and plan for them.
• When there is no map of the future, cannot provide direction or create a map,

#7 Cognitive skills

• Limited long-term memory
• Small working memory: able to only retain a small amount of information and knowledge while working on something.
• Limited logic and reasoning: not able to use facts, evidence, rules, and principles to draw valid conclusions and make sound judgments. Errors, biases, and fallacies distorts their thinking and lead to poor outcomes.
• Visual processing: Poor ability to interpret the information their eyes receive.
• Processing speed: takes a long time to receive information, process it, and figure out what to do.
• Attention
  1. Sustained – cannot stay focused for long periods of time.
  2. Selective – easily distracted.
  3. Divided – can only do one thing at a time.

#8 Cannot quickly learn and unlearn: paradigms, frameworks, methodologies, data, facts, knowledge. Unable to unlearn.

 #9 Creativity

• Cannot think about a task or a problem in a new or different way.
• Cannot create new ideas and act upon them.

What are your next steps?

#1 Understand how your board of directors and C-Suite talent is perceived.

#2 Data collection must be anonymous. A third-party can help provide anonymity.

#3 Define the components of talent to be assessed.

#4 A key set of questions for each component of talen can be:

• Are they the very best in the industry? – no company has superior talent
• Are they above average?
• Are they average?
• Are they below average?
• Should one or more be replaced immediately?

Consider asking why they have that perception.

#5 Assessing the Board of directors

• Each director assesses themselves and then the rest of the directors, as one group.
• The C-Suite also does assessment of the board as a whole.
• A random sample of employees, customers, suppliers also assess the board as a whole. One possible response could be that have no opinion.

#6 Assessing the C-Suite

• Each C-Suite member assess themselves and then the rest of the C-Suite, as one group.
• The board of directors also does assessment of the C-Suite as a whole.
• A random sample of employees, customers, suppliers also assess the C-Suite as a whole. One possible response could be that have no opinion.

#7 Discuss the findings and document everyone’s views about what the implications are.  Have this discussion first in two groups: the board and the C-Suite.  Then have a joint meeting of the board and C-Suite to discuss.

What further reading should you do?

Your company will fail

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/your-company-will-fail-v1/

Why will your company fail?

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/why-will-your-company-fail/

What are the core components of talent?

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/core-components-of-talent/

What is the purpose of this article?

• Share my critical learnings from my three-day attendance at Collision 2023 in June 2023. Collision was a North American startup conference with 36,000+attendees, ranging from pre-revenue founders to large established companies, and investors ranging from angel investors to multi-billion-dollar funds.
• The critical learnings section below are my key learnings from Collision. I believe that these learnings apply to any size company.
• The observations section below are some of the facts and opinions shared by presenters. I believe these have massive short and long-term implications.  Reach out to me if you wish to discuss the implications.
• The learnings and observations in this article are only a tiny subset of my 48 pages of notes.

You can download a PDF of this article from: Critical learnings from Collision 2023

What are the critical learnings in this article?

• There is close to a universal belief that the critical aspects of talent are: collaboration, learning, and problem solving – and that these are hard to find. Hard skills are easier to find but of less value.
• Generative AI was a universal them. Jobs with limited skills and experience will be eliminated or dramatically reduced in the next three years e.g. call centre staff, law firm associates.
• There continued to be unlimited money available to start and grow companies BUT due diligence has dramatically improved with a stronger focus on competitively differentiated talent.
• If a company can train, develop, and grow an employee who had spent decades in prison, I wonder why many companies are unable to train, develop, and grow their employees. Too often the easy approach seems to be fire and replace.

 What were my key observations?

• The world is no longer predicable.
• Hire people for purpose and values.
• Ask people why they stay at the company. Do a NPS (Net Promotor Score) with current employees.
• There’s a company that helps other companies hire former prisoners. This company hired someone who had been in prison for decades.  The person first started in customer support and ended up as a customer support manager.
• A survey of over 200 Chief Technology officers revealed the top three things they were looking for in employees: ability to collaborate, ability to learn, ability to problem solve. Coding skills and knowledge of coding languages was not in the top 3.
• 15 years ago, the competitive differentiator for software engineers was their coding skills. Today, the competitive differentiator is problem solving.
• The most important factors in selecting founders are: what will enable them to survive the hard times; why are they doing the startup; what is motivating them.
• Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram with 13 employees. The capabilities of current and emerging tools will enable a single person to create and sell a company for $1 billion.
• Apple Vision Pro will make remote work similar to being in person. Collaboration, team meetings, etc. will be far more effective than today.
• Look at the customer ROI and customer risk, not just the company ROI and company risk.
• Deliver to customers far more value than price. Willingness to pay is based on value.
• Casetext, a legal AI firm, has launched CoCounsel, a legal AI assistant with the potential to replace law firm associates. Thomson Reuters announced they’re buying Casetext for $650 million US.
• AI will change the talent pyramid in Financial Services.
• Generative AI will increase polarization in society.
• 50% of the people in a session I attended, use AI to create the emails they send.
• ChatGbt-4 already scores in the top 10% in LSAT and SAT tests.
• The capabilities of Generative AI are doubling every 3 months.
• In the near future, everyone will be able to create movies themselves with personalized content. E.g. each person could be a character in the totally realistic movie.
• Expedia has 70,000 terabytes of data.
• The number of pre-seed and seed fintech raises are at a record level this year. The total dollar amount is lower.
• A good portfolio company will run with bad news to their Venture Capital investors.

What are your next steps?

• Identify the roles that have the great impact on the value proposition for your customers and users.
• Determine the additional value the roles must provide, in this hyper-competitive world we live in.
• Identify the additional talent requirements.
• Determine how best, from a customer perspective, to meet those requirements i.e. what combination of human and Generative AI.
• Benchmark your talent assessment, hiring, developing, promotion, succession and exits process, technology, and staffing relative to the best companies in the world. What are the implications in terms of your company’s long-term success? What changes do you need to make? Start with the board of directors.

 What further reading should you do?

Generative AI – by McKinsey

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/generative-ai

Is your company planning to fail?

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/