Omar Usman – 3 Lessons From What The CEO Wants You To Know By Ram Charan
AI: Summary ©
In this video, Ram Charan discusses the importance of understanding the building blocks of every business, including understanding the big picture, understanding the roles of each division, and focusing on paying customers. He gives examples of how a street vendor in India sells fruit, how a CEO needs to understand the strengths of their team members, and how strong a leader is to achieve success in their business. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the elements of a business and putting people in the right positions to succeed.
AI: Summary ©
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.