© 2006-2010. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All rights reserved.
CORNER
OFFICE
CONFIDENCE®
FOR CXO's
Situational Crisis
Individual Guidance
Organizational Dynamics
Conflict Resolution
Transition
Succession
Exit
Next Act
BALANCE YOUR BUSINESS
IN THE WORLD. FIND A PERSONAL PATH
THROUGH
BUSINESS DILEMMAS.
NOW THAT YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING
Or, it feels that way, doesn't it? Every morning brings a new stress. Even today you need better results all the time. It can't take a few quarters to cycle through to success. With the pressures inside and out, you can't wait a quarter. Take a misstep and they are baying for your job or your assets. People say it is lonely at the top, and yet no decision you make seems private; each seems archived for all time, to be second guessed tomorrow, next quarter, ten years from now, in print, in someone's book or casebook. That is your image up there on the screen two storeys high; that is your confidence, belief, intelligence and concept magnified along with your eyebrow and your shoulder. Your words will echo back, years later.
As you worry now which critical sleeper issues lie out there unspotted---or deliberately disregarded by some team, or worse--- you vaguely wonder which of your own words will end up in the Journal, in a casebook --- or in a pre-trial brief....You need advice fast whether you are CEO, COO, CFO, CIO or CLO or another variant of CXO. You need a sounding board, not just for the acquisition or the brewing crisis, but for every day, a running conversation with someone who can track who is who, what problem is yours, what questions to ask and how to find solutions to maintain a flow of actions.
GATHERING STORM
Whether your company has been hit hard by the current financial storm or not, your business is balanced at the same economic inflection point as every other. Whether your company has been collateral damage or has been at the heart of the storm, even if you are still flush with success, new uncertainty lies one quarter, three quarters, eight and ten quarters out. The global economic fallout and the radical changes in government policy across nations promise a storm. The storm is certain to gather into a hurricane, a hurricane with embedded tornadoes in finance, regulation, politics and free trade. The trade winds have already begun to blow harsh. Where will it not end, but where will it go? You will still be responsible for the results. "They" are keeping score.
Left © NewDawnSingers.iStockPhoto Right © RadiantByte.iStockPhoto
IT'S A KILLER RACE
You are driven to make fast decisions. With the wrong guidance you can pull the wrong trigger and without any guidance you can freeze; or vice versa. You have no privacy and no time. Technology has opened too many windows for the world to look in 24/7/365. As the world looks in, some people understand that it is archived for the future and some people don't. Time gets accelerated as technology drives the people. The flow of action skews relationships, processes, ideas, data, advice and decisions. It overloads the scales. Too many don't stop to sort the good from the husks--or the hustings. And the pressure is on you to glean the kernels of value, innovate and grow. You have a mountainload of data; you have advice in every corner, all too much of it a mirror of your latest words. You have additional vision, strategies, and plans and not enough time to do what you have to do and then do the extra it takes to innovate, expand and plan ahead. You are overwhelmed. I can give you the right guidance. We can partner to filter the information, develop our own, and develop alternative scenarios and solutions and pick the best.
Image After © Syl.iStockPhoto
ARE YOU PLAYING AGAINST THE CLOCK?
You would not have gotten to where you are today if you had not wanted it, but how do you deal with what you have got? Successes come and successes go, and there is always a need to make the next move, but you feel that you are playing a dozen simultaneous chess games in-house and out. You have staff and consultants, and some days you feel the model hum, but some days you wonder who has messed up what where and can only hope that someone is right when they say this corner over here is going like gangbusters. Yet you must maintain the corporate mythology that everything is fine Who can you trust with what? Have they read what they have said they have read and seen what they saw and have they analyzed it correctly? You yourself get distracted. It is hard to keep up. Worse, everyone now has a forked agenda: their business agenda and their personal advancement agenda. It's easier to deal with the out and out requests for bribes. You know what those look like and sound like and how to say "no." It's this other tangle where you don't know quite what their angle is and whether they are advancing a winning agenda to garner success or acceding to a losing agenda to stick some rival with failure. Are they even on your side? How do you make sure that you are hearing what you are hearing and seeing the truth? What happens when you start hearing things you don't like and not believing what you are seeing? The competition inside the walls is almost as bad as that outside.
Andy Grove wrote, notoriously, "Only the paranoid survive." Perhaps so. Who is valid and who your sycophant-- and who your enemy waiting for your job or a little revenge? Some days you admit to your cup of cappuccino that you're just glad that it was not your EVP who tried to sell your company sua sponte......Leave that to Dow. Come talk to me.
Image © Gyula Sarudi.Fotolia
WARTIME
Outside pressures, inside strife, limited resources, warring factions, competition for leadership, intrigue, betrayal and then you have to go out and compete with the enemy on the field. On the best days, you think you have a very well run company with the best of talent and best of product. On the worst days, all parts seem about to come apart all at once: miscellaneous employees on the frontlines pulling ridiculous stunts, rogue teams, random teams, silos, Sales and Marketing haranguing IT, the CIO and the CFO totally incomprehending the other. You have a well run operation and yet in this world any harm, dissension, demands, bad ideas and the occasional office romance may all be archived, leaked and massaged into news pulp. In a quarter-driven world you worry about what to expect next as inside and outside they all compete for recognition, compensation and elevation. And with all the stress come your conflicting constituents, all of whom want a piece of the return. The puzzle seems to have more moving parts each day. Even in the good days, investors no longer saw even mid-term. Institutions all seemed to have become shrill. Hedge funds moved into your stock, scored hits in 9 months and vanished unseen. You knew they were in your stock and think they will be in your stock - or at least you fear they will be in your stock - unless their money's all gone. The Nouveau-Boone/Icahn activists arrived and wanted a seat on your board. They didn't care for your people or product; they boasted that all they cared about was making money, as if that were a good thing. They couldn't see the forest for the trees and they'd strip your cash, slash through your assets and drive down morale.
Your existing directors sprout agendas and pontificate about having you out of the room when the discussion gets serious while you are just trying to get work done. The sophisticated director joins the board and lobs a grenade. It's no time to be without guidance. Are these constituents still out there? They all wanted it now. How do you get the focus back on the products and delivering the goods? Come talk to me and develop a plan.
Image After © Robert Pernell.iStockPhoto
AND WHEN IT IS TIME TO GO...
How do you plan succession in this environment, when whoever you pick today may have the wrong temperament for tomorrow? The go getter, the doer, with high tolerance for risk, high demand for compensation, light regard for legal nuances, may run straight into a wall. The globalist may be ill-prepared for coming trade wars. The prudent counsel may be too conservative for growth and thetechnologist too enamoured of innovation and invention to see limitations of a model. None of them is broad enough for the job...And you suspect that all of them want yours! Now! How do you move forward to succession without becoming lame duck CXO, particularly lame duck CEO?
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Sigrid Caroline Schroder
(877) 462-4035
Unlike other consultants, large and small, I don't slide you off on staff or a network.
Who you meet is who you get. 
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