Top 10 Things You Should Do As a CEO

A little bit of humor... LinkedIn’s AI tool recommended I write a post about “The top 10 things you should do as a CEO”.

1. Maniacally demand you implement NetSuite because it’s SUPER IMPORTANT. Ignore everything else you could be doing as a company. Don’t bother to change your arbitrary processes to match NetSuite, instead pay your implementor to heavily customize it so you get a multi-hundred thousand dollar bill. Then for bonus points, refuse to pay the vendor’s bill so you can collect that lawsuit Pokémon card - a lawsuit you are sure to lose.
2. Don’t bother to obsess over customers or your products. Instead, obsess over the colors and fonts of your internal dashboards. Even better, have them redone 10x and make 5x variations of the same dashboards. Your investors will drool over how your dashboards match your ever changing brand colors.
3. You could cost efficiently make a straight forward company website in a week for less than $1000 and some Markdown in Pelican combined with GitHub Actions, S3 and CloudFront but that is for losers. As CEO, you know the way to go is spend more than $100K on your website re-doing it 3x in one year… each time making it harder to navigate. Only then will you be able to say IT’S AWESOME. As bonus points, you arbitrarily make it so 1/2 way down the website the navigation randomly changes to horizontal from vertical so that you can frustrate any visitors.
4. There might be storm clouds on the horizon, so to make sure you can see them clearly, you decide to spend >$500K to fly everyone to a beachfront city, rent a big yacht and cruise around. You can’t think of a better use of that investor money and how can you be sure those are storm clouds if you aren’t enjoying yourself out on the water looking at them very closely?
5. When you realize those are storm clouds, you act decisively. On Monday you decide it’s time for layoffs that will happen by Thursday. Not the Thursday a few weeks down the road, THIS THURSDAY right after Monday because IT’S SUPER IMPORTANT. For more bonus points, you rank sort the entire company by salary and propose you start cutting based on salary because - you know - there is absolutely no relationship between talent & knowledge and compensation. If there was, would you actually be the CEO even though you couldn’t normally be trusted to manage a lemonade stand?
6. Put the lawyer in charge of HR. Actually, while you’re at it put the lawyer in charge of everything. You’ve seen Jurassic Park more than once but - although the lawyer got eaten by T-Rex (on the visitor toilet) while the dinosaur experts actually survived the entire park - you know that in the real world, it’s the lawyers who make a start-up succeed. Expertise is for the movies.
7. Practice your shocked Pikachu face in the mirror for that day when you find out your finance department wired a six figure payment to a Nigerian Prince because as CEO you had zero time to invest in ensuring you had solid financial controls and processes. Those internal dashboard colors weren’t going to pick themselves and you were blinded by the reflection off the water while looking for storm clouds on that yacht you rented.
8. Hire experts with resumes from the most successful companies and then ignore them. Better yet, tell them why they’re wrong in all the areas you’ve never spent a single day studying or actually doing.
9. When the CISO recommends you might not have invested sufficiently in proper controls, processes and security, ignore that nonsense. You have better things to do and other people to blame. Does anyone really expect the CEO to be ultimately responsible? Your name isn’t Harry S. Truman after all.
10. Focus very seriously and intently when asking people the truly hard question: What is your favorite ice cream flavor?

If you achieve all 10 of these, promptly yell “Yahtzee!” and congratulate yourself on a job well done.

I am kidding. Please do NOT do any of these. I can’t imagine anyone would actually do a single one of these let alone all 10. They do say that reality is stranger than fiction though.

Honorable Mentions

1. Ensure every executive leadership meeting be conducted at expensive restaurants accompanied by multiple bottles of only the best wine. And not the cheap $150 stuff… you’re not a Teutonic barbarian. Minimum $400 because YOLO and - as CEO - you know your direct reports do their best thinking only when their BAC exceeds the legal limit. As a joke on your CFO, ensure you run up such a large bill on the company credit card at a Chinese restaurant that he cancels your corporate card fearing fraud… I mean who is this random P.F. Chang guy on that crazy bill?
2. Buy a treadmill and conduct the majority of your company meetings while your head bobs up and down on Zoom. Nothing screams CEO more than looking like a bobblehead toy.
3. Talking about Zoom… you could buy just a single license to Zoom for meetings where you really, really need to present and see the other people during your presentation but… why buy one license when you can buy 100? It’s a lot more fun to spend $20,400 per year than 19.99/mo. Frugality is for chumps like Amazon and it’s not like that dot com nonsense went anywhere, right?
4. Remember as CEO you are NEVER wrong. Yes, you did specifically ask - in writing - your recruiting team to prepare a document discussing only open employee roles and then threw a temper tantrum when they didn’t include contractor roles. Do you apologize? Of course not! After all whose fault is that? Not yours! Why haven’t they learn to read minds just like you have instead of pointing to what you wrote down? Logic like apologies is for losers.
5. As CEO you don’t drive over bridges. Ever. This is a problem because your company’s office is on the other side of a bridge. That is OK though because the solution is obvious: spend more investor cash to have one office on each side of the bridge. The bridge might be only 3.5 miles long, the second office might be empty 99% of the time, and you really, really like your treadmill… but so what?

It was tough deciding that these five not be in the original top 10 list of the most important things you should do as CEO. I squared the circle by realizing these five were too outlandish for anyone to actually do. At least I hope not!