Get to CEO: Chart Your Path, Learn the Skills and Avoid the Mistakes to Get There Faster

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Sue, and my children, Jack, Annika, Tom, Christian, Sanne, and Nicholette. If not for your deep love, support, and Let’s go for it! adventurous spirit, not one of my experiences would have happened, nor would one word of this book have been written.

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Part I. Self Awareness

Chapter 1. Goals

Chapter 2. Realistically Assess Your Skills

Chapter 3. What Is Your Superpower?

Chapter 4. What Does Success Mean to You?

Chapter 5. What Drives Your Success?

Chapter 6. How Do You Influence Others?

Part II. Performance Routine

Chapter 7. What Is Your Signature?

Chapter 8. Establish Highly Productive Routines

Chapter 9. Learn and Don’t Stop Learning

Chapter 10. Pause and Reflect

Chapter 11. Don’t Be the Smartest Person In the Room

Chapter 12. Measure Your Performance

Chapter 13. Getting Unstuck

Part III. Run to the Fire

Chapter 14. What Does It Mean to Run to the Fire?

Chapter 15. Which Fires Do I Run To?

Chapter 16. Choose Your Team Carefully

Chapter 17. Say Yes and Figure It Out

Chapter 18. Confront Stuff, Look Around Corners, and Believe

Chapter 19. You Must Be Nuts

Part IV. Manage Up

Chapter 20. Don’t Let Your Ego Get the Best of You

Chapter 21. Know Your Numbers

Chapter 22. Are You a Threat?

Part V. Serve Others

Chapter 23. Inspiring Others

Chapter 24. Remember You Are Human

Chapter 25. Be Ready to Lead

Chapter 26. See the Future and Paint the Picture

Chapter 27. The Helpless CEO

Start Your Journey Reading List

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Epigraph

What most people fear makes few people great.

Introduction

To achieve the results that only 5 percent of the population has, you have to have the guts to do what the other 95 percent are unwilling to do.

—Robin Sharma

I have always been struck by this quote.

It reframes my thinking. I always thought of success in terms of the things that I had to do. Tasks I had to accomplish to get ahead. Plans I had to make. Chances I had to take.

I only understood later in life that I got ahead because I did things others weren’t doing or weren’t willing to do. I took on projects others didn’t want. I went into the office on Sunday mornings at half past four while my family slept. I got on planes to take care of clients when others thought it unnecessary. I chose to take challenging roles in foreign countries while others called me nuts to uproot my family, learn a new language, and seek success. The risk could have derailed my career. What happens if I failed, and the company doesn’t have a role for me when I come back?

Although I heard Robin Sharma utter those words later in my career, I had already engaged in his advice. Maybe that’s why I cherish the quote and why it struck me as truth.

I want to help you realize this truth as you read this book.

You are reading this book because you are an aspiring leader, interested in learning how to get to the top faster. You want to become the CEO, acquire the skills and habits to get there, and avoid the pitfalls in the process. The trek to CEO isn’t very clear. Whether you are navigating your career in a large organization or acquiring the skills in a smaller company, getting to the top job isn’t an obvious, well-worn path.

Talk to any CEO. The path to get the job creates uncertainty and risk—and careers are often humbled with failure and personal sacrifice. But CEOs have one thing in common: They persevered, kept moving forward, created opportunities where they could, and developed their own methods of success.

Studies of CEOs have shown that the path isn’t always straight up (Botelho, 2018). Sometimes you must go sideways to get ahead. Sometimes you must take a role where you learn skills you don’t have so that you can move forward. Sometimes sticking your neck out, failing, learning, and sitting on the sidelines to wait for another shot is necessary.

Achievers understand this. Climbing the ladder of life, entrepreneurship, parenthood, business, or academia is never a linear upward ascent. Though it might sound frustrating, the nonlinear nature of some of these experiences is where we learn the most and become the most patient, observant, and understanding of others. Rather than simply driving hard all the time, we learn to slow down, listen, understand others, and grow in our wisdom and leadership.

Mark Zuckerberg, accused of stealing the idea for Facebook from two Harvard classmates, overcame the hurdles and has built a global social media organization. Jeff Bezos, rejected by twenty-three venture capital firms, went on to found and lead Amazon to greatness. Oprah Winfrey, fired from her first television job as a news anchor, went on to create the most watched talk show on television and build a media empire. Steve Jobs, fired from Apple, the company he founded, experienced startup failure with NeXT prior to coming back to Apple and creating the iPhone, iMac, iPod, and iPad.

In addition to learning from failure and fostering the skills necessary for success, they learned to persevere—doing things others were unwilling to do.

The path to CEO isn’t obvious because you can’t get there via just the nine to five. Sure, you need to excel in your daily work. But that’s only the basic 95 percent effort required to get you to CEO. The other 5 percent, the 5 percent that gets you the job, is in personal development: getting up early to think and plan, taking the tough projects others won’t, putting yourself at risk where your peers aren’t willing. As you take on these and several other critical responsibilities, you will watch your peers fall away and not engage for several reasons: They have other priorities. They don’t want to commit to the time. They are completely risk-averse. They could also be just plain scared.

And, unfortunately, as you will read in my personal stories later, you may be ridiculed for doing what it takes. As you begin to do this, it will become obvious, as you watch others, that you are doing the things they aren’t willing to do. In its best sense, it can create personal power for you.

A path to acquiring the skills, mindset, habits, and leadership orientation necessary for getting to CEO exists, although it isn’t obvious. I will show you how self-awareness—understanding how you operate and are perceived by others—is paramount in your journey. You will learn how to perform in your roles and get credit for accomplishments. Taking risks (an important part of career advancement), learning, and launching to greater confidence are calibrated opportunities that one must learn to master. Do you really know how you are being measured? You will learn how to understand this concept and make it work for you and others. I will lead you through my failure with one of the most important concepts in business: managing up. Lastly, you can’t get ahead without others. How you serve others greatly dictates how they will serve you.

I have been a CEO for over twenty-five years, in large and small organizations, as a professional manager and entrepreneur. Having lived in five countries with my family and managed people through my business career in seventeen countries, I have had countless amazing experiences and suffered many failures, often far from home. I got my first top management job at thirty-three years old running a foreign office at a global advertising agency. I felt confident but scared to death and had no idea how to address the team. Little did I know, those were the least of my problems.

I have grown businesses ten times in size, navigated turnarounds, acquired global companies, and started companies from scratch. I have seen a lot in my career. Some of it I prepared for. Much I did not. But I fostered the ability to fall back on the learning pillars of success, failure, and experience to fashion a plan.

I will share many personal stories of the problems I faced, my successful solutions, and my struggles. You will see that my wife and family played an important role in my career, both in the joy and, sometimes, the suffering.

I would like you to emerge, having read this book, with your own plan to get to CEO. I will show you the blueprint to develop the skill set, avoid the pitfalls, and move forward confidently. To help you take action to develop your own plan, I have included a Quick Coaching Session at the end of each chapter to get you there faster.

Becoming a CEO is a realistic, chartable opportunity if you follow the path. I hope through sharing forty years of global business, personal development, and leadership experience, you will be well equipped to begin a successful journey to get to CEO.

Part One

Self Awareness

When talking about getting there, defining there is important. Have you set a goal? Do you want to gain an important opportunity, promotion, or some achievement of success? Do you want a happy marriage? Do you want to lose fifteen pounds? Getting there faster is about knowing where you’re going. And the only way to know where you’re going is to be aware—self-aware—of where you are.

Doing your own self-assessment is important. How do I feel about where I am today? What do I want to achieve tomorrow, a month from now, and a year from now? Where am I stuck? What is slowing me down? How happy am I, really? How happy are those around me who I care about? Do I feel like I’m really on the right path? Am I growing fast enough and getting noticed and promoted in my work?

The answers to these questions, and others you will certainly come up with yourself, are key to understanding where you are today. You can only set goals for where you want to be tomorrow when you understand where you are today. Self-awareness is a broad, all-encompassing term. For our purposes, I would like to simplify it. Where are you today? Where would you like to go tomorrow? It’s about how you feel about yourself now and how you would like to feel about yourself in the future. It’s about how you walk into a room and how you are perceived by others.

A deep understanding of these phenomena will help you recognize your skills, your confidence level, how much you are truly capable of, and most importantly, it will help you gain access to your superpowers. We will dig into each of these in Part One to help you become more self-aware and take the first steps toward getting to CEO.

Chapter 1

Goals

A goal properly set is halfway reached.

—Zig Ziglar

My biggest career mistake? I never wrote my goals down.

I always thought, I’ve got my goals in my head. While mostly true, they were not focused and admittedly unclear. I would often lose sight of them. When they are written down, you can revisit them. You can work from them. You can ideate from them, and you know where to go each day to look at them. You know where they are, and you know what they are. Otherwise, you roll into your office, and you take on whatever it is that happened to hit you that day or overnight.

Early in my career, I worked for a large global advertising agency. I had accepted a transfer from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany—a big opportunity! My wife Sue and I, who now have a large family together, were childless at the time. Over the five years living in Frankfurt, we celebrated having three children. Professionally, during that time, promotions came fast and furious. The company grew, and I grew with it. To continue my growth, an opportunity came up to move from Frankfurt to Copenhagen to take over one of the European offices there.

To complicate matters, Sue and I had many discussions about transferring back to the US to afford the grandparents more time to spend with the grandkids.

In one conversation, Sue pushed me on what my goals were. To be honest, I’d never thought about specific goals. I chased the ladder. I chased challenges. I helped my clients. And all of it seemed to be going in the right direction for me. I received many promotions, and now I had a great opportunity to run an office in Copenhagen. What’s the big deal?

Our discussions got more intense.

Why didn’t I have goals? Where are we going as a family? Why didn’t I plan for us, versus having the company make the decisions? These were good questions.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t considered them much. Sue always thought things over deeply because she would have to bear the large burden of moving our family, working through finding a new place to live, finding doctors, figuring out the language, and doing simple things like grocery shopping—typically while I worked.

More importantly, she prompted me to dig for answers because she had a career prospect. She had been offered a position as the first special education