Episode 313 - 10 Signs Of A Great Future CEO
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
224.15356
Summary
In this episode, Patrick talks about the 10 signs that you will become a great CEO. These are the 10 traits that will make you a great leader. 1. Avoid seeking perfection 2. Give feedback 3. Coach 4. Challenge 5. Rally 6. Rally the troops 7. Coach the team 8. Challenge the people 9. Coach, Coach, and Challenge 10. Rally The Team
Transcript
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30 seconds, one time for the underdog, ignition sequence start, let me see you put em up, reach
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the sky, touch the stars up above, cause it's one time for the underdog, one time for the
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I'm Patrick Biddeby, host of Aletainment, and today I'm going to talk to you about 10
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So look, in every single organization, no matter what industry it is, there's always
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going to be a department that's ran by people who are generally, naturally perfectionist.
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This product has to be cut perfectly right, right?
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You know, whatever they're designing has to be perfect.
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You know, the sculpture, the design of a building, architecture, perfect.
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There's many departments that have a need for people that are perfectionists, but sometimes
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perfectionists are also extremely sensitive, and if they're not happy with the product,
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you give any criticism, back then they're immobilized, right?
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As a CEO, if you seek perfection, there's a different department for you.
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You're seeking magic while hiring people on the team that seek perfection.
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It's a weird dynamic, because if the person you're working with, the CEO, wants everything
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to be perfect, 90% of the time, whatever you deliver to them is not there.
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It's not at their standard, so eventually people are like, you know what, what I'm doing
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may not be that good enough, so it actually makes people perform less and be more hesitant
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and want it to be more open and want it to play more offense and get more creative.
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So to be a great CEO at the top, you've got to avoid seeking perfection.
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So look, many times you'll look at the people you have on your team, and you will identify
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the group of people that are very good at giving feedback, coaching, and challenging
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It'll be as simple as somebody comes up and says, hey guys, listen, what I noticed earlier
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what we did was great, but I think we can take it to a whole different level.
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Hey, Mary, why don't you give that spunk that you typically have?
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Or they'll pull somebody aside and say, you know, John, I want to have a conversation with
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I don't know what's going on with you lately, but I'm not feeling like you're giving your
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Is there something we don't know about that you're frustrated with at the work environment?
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Those conversations are a must for anybody that one day becomes a CEO.
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And most people who avoid conflict and don't like friction, don't like those kinds of challenges
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with personalities, you may be a great performer within a company, but to become a CEO
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you're going to have a lot of conversations like that with many different departments
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from investors, executives, salespeople, support, vendors, partners, media, a lot of people.
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So that has to be a very simple comfort zone for you to give feedback, challenge, and push
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Okay, so this next one kind of has to do with feedback, coaching, and challenging people.
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You know, coaching, challenging is wanting to bring people into your office and have a
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You know, you're rallying against a new campaign, a new competitor.
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You're rallying for a vision, a cause, something that's big.
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You know, at any given time when you're driving a business, at any given time when you're growing
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your company, you're going to have certain times that not everybody feels like running.
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A lot of different distractions get people's energy to go lower, and they're like, I'm
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Bringing everybody of many different personalities together, many different backgrounds together.
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Let's come together and go do something that seems very difficult to do, but I believe
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Great future quality of a CEO is somebody who's great at rallying the troops.
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So, there's a lot of different data you can measure in your employees and your team members
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Lots of different data, but there's one data that's hard to measure, yet I promise you,
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Say it's a Saturday, 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
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And you're a Monday through Friday type of a company, hypothetically.
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And you're trying to get a hold of some people because something happened, a crisis.
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So, who are the three people that you know, if you text, you email, you call, like this,
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You know those three people you just thought about?
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Those three people have a quality that can't be measured, but every organization, every
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I started writing a list of all the names of people that are the most reliable that I do
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Look at the list of people I have that are so reliable.
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Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, you know, Wednesday night, midnight, 1 o'clock.
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Now, somebody may watch this and they may say something like, this is exactly the opposite
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And Patrick wants companies to go back to the way Ford ran it.
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Not who can be director, not who can be controller, not who can be an executive, CEO.
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And for that person to be a CEO, you need everybody to rely on this person to make the right decision.
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So for you watching this, if I ask the person you work with, would you be on the list of
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If not, just know that this value that cannot be measured may be at this level of importance
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to a board or an organization that may one day consider hiring you as a CEO.
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I spent a lot of time talking about this at the Vault Conference, and it's about learning
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The former chief talent officer of Netflix sat there when her and I were speaking.
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She said the one thing that was so special about working with Reed Hastings from Netflix
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is she's in her fifth year in business with Netflix.
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She comes into work one day, and she notices that Reed is recruiting the former HR and chief
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And Reed says, I know it's your position, but what if something happens to your health
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See, that's an example of a person that realized to build a $150 billion company one day, you
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Many times you may recruit somebody in, and you think you have them.
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You're still recruiting them, and recruiting them, and recruiting them, and finding another
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person, and another person, and another person, and another person.
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Anybody that eventually becomes a great CEO, there's one ability.
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There's one ability that you've got to have to constantly win and grow your organization,
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continuously grow your organization, is the ability to recruit talent that wants to come
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and work for you and your organization with your vision over your competitors.
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Okay, this is another one that you cannot measure, but it's very critical if you want
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So every time, you know, when there's a process of trying to size out your teammates and whoever
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you're working with, one of the greatest times to do this is when crisis takes place.
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And it's such a great time when crisis takes place.
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So you can't let a crisis go by without getting everything you can out of a crisis.
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When a crisis happens, we had one earlier today.
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When a crisis happens, you look around, and you see, look at that person right there.
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And you know what's crazy about that person right there?
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Calm because you know what the next five things you're going to do that you have control over.
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It's a big difference between careless and saying, I don't care.
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And if you're going to one day lead an organization and you want to continue to grow this organization
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to a different level, it's going to be a lot of pressure, a lot of fires, a lot of dragons
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And somebody at the top who leads this organization has to be a person that knows how to stay
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So you know how sometimes you work with somebody and somebody will come up to you and say,
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you know what, Pache, can I talk to you for a second?
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Please don't be offended by this, but I just want to kind of make an observation.
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You know, I noticed you were a little bit frustrated in the meeting earlier.
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And I also didn't like the comment that was made by the other person who's a vendor and
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And I feel like they were a little bit out of place to ask us to have to pay more.
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And I was kind of weird for them to come from that approach.
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And I kind of saw what was happening on this side.
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But I feel like we need to go back to them, speak to them about this.
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And you're sitting there saying, huh, good for you.
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It's the ability to read somebody that's trying to sell you something.
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It's the ability to read somebody that's not happy working where they're working at.
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It's the ability to read, which you cannot, you can go read all the books you want.
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A part of it is having worked in an environment that's maybe sports, a lot of pressure, a family,
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a difficult family, problematic family, military, that they can handle these type of things
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And a person like that in a company growing is generally going to do well.
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Because one skill set you are going to need to be a CEO is you've got to learn how to read
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Next one you've probably heard a million different times, but it's learning how to listen.
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And not just listening to what people are saying.
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A lot of times people ask me, I had so many people ask me and say, Pat, how do you remember
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the person said this and that person said this and this person said this?
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I literally listen to what you're telling me and I'm trying to process it and internalize
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But sometimes you just don't listen to what people are telling you.
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Sometimes you also got to listen to what people are not telling you.
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Sometimes listening to people that are not telling you anything is giving a way bigger
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message than listening to people that are telling you something.
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So you got to read the whole room that I'm talking about earlier, but you do that by being
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able to listen to what everybody's telling you and not telling you.
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So listening skills is a very big skill to have.
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As you move up, the more you move up, you actually will be doing less talking, you'll
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Believe it or not, I know this kind of sounds strange.
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At the lower level, you may be doing more talking, but at a higher level, you're doing
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less talking, you're doing more listening because you have to get updates from so many
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different departments and the ability to listen is a very valuable skill set to have.
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Say you come to work and you got somebody that needs to be working on certain areas in their
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Why don't you go and say, Johnny, can I talk to you?
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And you pull Johnny aside and say, Johnny, I would like to see this, this, this improve
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because I've noticed that we've been doing this, but I don't think we've been doing it
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at, you know, par and we can do a much better job with this, but I feel you got to get this
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thing better with yourself and improve in this area.
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Hypothetically, we have a conversation like that.
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Then you notice this person shuts down for a week, okay?
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This person may be extremely creative who shut down for a week.
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And they're extremely sensitive who shut down for a week.
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Now it's okay if he does that because he's a one man show.
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Imagine if a CEO gets a million different criticisms every day.
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It's like, oh my gosh, so many people are not happy with what I'm doing that they go into
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the corner office, they lock it up, they turn off the lights, and they hide there.
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So nobody comes and gives them more criticism because they don't want to get more feedback.
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You're going to have a lot of different things that people are going to tell you that's going
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And pretty much everything's going to fall on you as a CEO.
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You've got to figure out a way to challenge your leaders and get better.
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So as a CEO, if you're monitoring people, yourself, if you want to be a CEO one day,
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you're sizing everybody up, saying, I want to be a CEO one day, you cannot be the person
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that gets so sensitive that takes you a week to get over something that somebody told you.
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If you do, you have a quality of somebody that may one day potentially be a CEO.
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So you know how you have some people that say, you know, a conversation, it's a very easy
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I used to love having lunch with my employees every day.
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When we had, you know, less than 20 employees, I'd do lunch with them every day.
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And we'd sit in the conference room and we'd talk and I would talk about current event.
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It's very easy to find out who is very strategic when you're asking questions like this.
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What would you do differently to help with the unemployment?
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You know what's going on right now with, you know, Kaepernick or what's going on with NFL?
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What do you think is the direction to go to make better movies?
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You know, there used to be better horror movies.
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Say you have the funding that they're giving you for XYZ.
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How would you solve the educational program that we have in America today?
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Oh, listen, if you think about it, the curriculum is the challenge.
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Then the curriculum is holding the teachers accountable as a challenge.
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You need somebody that's strategic to be at the top.
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Because that person needs to be able to say, here's our next 30 moves.
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Can you get me on a conference call with Larry?
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Can you bring our numbers for the last six months?
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Can we get a meeting at 2 o'clock with such and such person?
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You see all of a sudden, 12 moves like this, right?
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And you can always spot it when people are coming up.
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Because your strategic people always say, here's the next seven things I think we need to be doing.
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So if you yourself, something comes up, do you look this way?
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Or do you say, here's 11 things I would be doing.
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It's very hard to get to the 10 to the 15 moves.
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But the grandmasters in chess, they know their 10 to 15 moves that they're going to make when they play against somebody like you.
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So, having said that, those are the 10 qualities of future great CEOs.
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And by the way, if you haven't already subscribed to Valuetainment on iTunes, please do so.
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And if you have any questions for me that you may have, you can always find me on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.
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