Omar Usman – 3 Lessons From What The CEO Wants You To Know By Ram Charan

Hey, guys. Omar Usman here. Today, I'm sharing

3 things I learned from reading what the

CEO wants you to know by Ram Charan.

In this book, he talks about business acumen,

which is basically understanding the basic building blocks

of every business regardless of its size and

how they're used to generate cash and profit

for a for a business.

The first lesson I learned was understand the

big picture.

In the book, he talks a lot about

how people get put into silos at their

work. So someone might work in a marketing

department

and all they think about is their marketing

division. Or someone might be in an IT

department, all they think about is their IT

division. And what happens is that when you're

in that silo, you have you might have

a lot of depth of understanding in your

particular vertical,

but you lack an understanding of the overall

business. And so a lot of times, upper

management may make decisions

that you don't like or you think is

negatively impacting your team or your division and

that's because you're not understanding how the overall

business works. In order to be a good

leader, you have to understand

how all the divisions are related and how

they're contributing to a larger big picture of

the business.

He gives a great example of some of

the building blocks that are used to build

the big picture. He talks about a street

vendor in India selling fruit. And so he

says that this vendor has to know every

morning how much to invest in his fruit,

how ripe it should be, what type of

inventory

to keep, how many different types of fruit,

what the profit margins are, and he also

has to know how many customers to expect,

what kinds of things he's going to sell,

and also build loyalty with his customer with

his customer base in order to sell that

fruit. And if he has inventory that goes

to waste, he loses money. If he loses

customers, he loses

money. If he doesn't set the prices properly,

he'll lose people to his competitors.

All of these are the essential building blocks

that go into any business that everyone has

to learn and master.

The second lesson is that the building blocks

of every business are the same. I kind

of talked about it a little bit with

the street vendor, but Jaron lays out 3

major things that everyone needs to know. Cash

generation,

return on assets, and growth. Now what happens

with business is that as a business grows,

these things become more and more and more

complex.

But what a good CEO is able to

do is reduce their complexity down to the

basic level. And this is also for someone

that even if they're not in a leadership

level or at a CEO level, what the

CEO wants you to know is if you

can understand the basics of any of these

three components

and you're able to communicate that to your

leadership,

that makes you that much more valuable to

your organization. Another major building block that people

overlook is customers. Now that sounds very basic,

but if you wanna have a successful business,

you have to have paying customers. And in

order to find customers,

you have to be able to sell people

something that they need or want. How you

find that out is simply by talking to

people and asking them what they need. It's

amazing how many businesses that there are that

overlook this very critical and super basic step.

They come up with something. They assume that

people need it without actually talking to anyone,

without actually testing the idea and then they

try to bring it to market, invest a

lot in marketing tactics and all these things

and then they end up failing. You have

to focus on those basics. And a great

CEO

is the one that can reduce the complexity

down to these basic levels of his organization.

The third lesson that I learned from this

book was that strong leaders are those who

harness the strengths of their team members

and put them in the right positions to

succeed. It takes a lot of insight to

be able to recognize what someone's strengths are,

where they're where they're best suited.

And when you put people in the right

position,

that creates a synergy.

That creates an effectiveness in getting results

and that's what gives you an edge in

execution and gives you a competitive advantage

over other teams. But it takes time on

the part of a leader to sit down

and actually get to know their employees, get

to know their team members, and find out

where their strengths are and tying that strength

to a business need. That's where the key

that's the key combination that's needed to have

a successful business.

Those are the 3 lessons that we got

from this book. Hope you enjoyed. Please make

sure you check out the description to find

to get a link to the book. And

also make sure you subscribe to the channel

and get more of these videos as we

release them every week. Thanks.