This week’s Barron’s July 11, 2022 cover story is about the top two dozen CEOs. A criterion that has usually been used to identify the top CEOs was their company’s stock performance. With the stock market down this year, they needed to reach for other measures, and I think the following applies to most successful leaders.
The article’s purpose was not to suggest stocks to invest in, but to identify key features of winning leaders. Below are 15 business-driven characteristics of top CEOs that stood out.
15 Attributes of Top CEOs
- Demonstrated ability to have their companies able to face potential and probable challenges.
- Maintaining financial strength and improvement when necessary.
- Quicker deliveries and responsiveness to customers.
- Obtaining workforce support for customer relationship improvements.
- Developing a model for recurring subscription customer revenue or membership fees.
- Learning from technology leaders outside their industry.
- Recruiting top talent. [This is an admirable quality, but I am a proponent of investing in internal development and growth of talent. However, sometimes reaching outside is necessary with rapidly changing business models.]
- Using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify more effective ways of getting things done. This includes using AI to help determine what, how and when to promote and market merchandise, schedule production cycles and inventory levels, and ascertain price elasticity and upmarket pricing.
- Extending product lines to nontraditional sources or uses.
- Partnering experimental and speculative research and development activities.
- Thoughtful pricing methods such as maintaining pre-inflationary prices and relying on sales volume increases to make up for the loss of revenues from the decreased margins. [This requires great care.]
- Simplifying the business structure, reducing debt and selling or divesting commodity or noncore businesses.
- Catering to customer needs in competitive business segments, including amenities, targeted deal-making, easy access help desks, improved and spruced up e-commerce facilities and better product pickups or shipments.
- Investments made during COVID in infrastructure that also enabled personnel to be retained rather than being laid off and are now paying huge dividends.
- A reduction in risk-averse attitudes by some CEOs, leading to more aggressive growth.
This is an abridged list and not everything would work for everyone and I recommend you read the entire article, which also has separate profiles of each CEO.
This list of the top traits a CEO should have can also be used as a “best practices” primer. There are a lot of cool actions here and they were all successful for these 24 CEOs’ companies.
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