If You Were to Write an Open Letter to CEOs, What Would You Say?

Not long ago I was honored by an invitation to contribute to a book developed under the auspices of Thinkers50, the global ranking of management thought leaders that rolls around every two years—including this year.

For the book I was asked to craft a brief letter addressed to global CEOs; my advice on what I perceive as their largest challenge packed into a teeny, tiny nutshell.

Just published is Dear CEO, the collected letters of 50 business thinkers the world over.

Between its two covers, this little book packs a lot of valuable insight on a range of leadership topics, valuable not just to CEOs but to management at every level.

Each brief, easily and quickly read letter provides a distilled perspective on the biggest business challenges of the day and tactics to address them.

Here’s a sample of contributors and their content:

Hal Gregersen, co-author of The Innovator’s DNA and Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center, reminds us that leaders aren’t necessarily chosen for the quality of their ideas; they’re hired for their ability to discover and hear the best ideas.

The last thing we should do is surround ourselves with “yes” men and women whose primary role is to bolster our ego. Listening is a hallmark of good leadership.

“What I’m suggesting, based on what I see the most impressive leaders doing, is that CEOs resolve right now to be less right, less vocal and less comfortable. They—meaning you—must find ways to keep toggling out of transmit mode and into receiving mode....

“If you don’t encourage the question-raising that will unlock future value for your enterprise, who will?”

Being at the top of the decision-making pyramid ideally means that ideas relative to the choices at hand will be channeled to you from every level and corner of that pyramid. This demands conscious effort and strategy to avoid the intrinsic isolation of the position. Leaders have to find ways to “encounter assumption-challenging input.”

Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers and Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New World of Work, also focuses on wringing value from all the human assets that surround leadership. 

“Many managers, hyper-focused on their own ideas and capability, shut down intelligence around them....

“People who are underutilized by their managers describe their experience as ‘frustrating’ and ‘exhausting’. Inevitably, the most talented employees quit, creating an expensive turnover problem. The less confident staff often ‘quit and stay’ leaving a more destructive morale problem as disillusioned employees infect the culture.”

She warns that we not only leave too many of our human resources untapped, we also discourage the best ones from staying with us and increasingly become a laboratory for discontent, disengagement and mediocre contribution.

“If you want a company that is battle ready, take inventory of your talent and ensure you are using all your firepower.”

Loss of trust and respect—the result of multiple high-profile and costly incidents of corruption and unethical behavior—is the greatest challenge facing leadership today is the opinion of Margarita Mayo, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IE Business School in Madrid and Visiting Professor at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. Successful business depends heavily on the confidence that employees and consumers invest in business leaders and that confidence is badly bruised.

In order to rebuild trust and reclaim the high level of influence that leaders need to exercise for good both inside and outside their enterprises,

Mayo suggests that CEOs (and others) “move away from managing transactional relationships and invest more time in building authentic relationships.”

Heart, Habits and Habitat are her three “H’s of Authentic Leadership”: identify the heart of your authentic style, reinvent through the development of new habits, and improve the habitat for your employees so that they can flourish.

For a final teaser, Tom Peters, Member of the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame and author of In Search of Excellence, the original guidebook for would-be business gurus, contributes a letter lightly salted with advice from other business leaders he admires and has learned from.

Each of these homilies is contextualized within a brief anecdote that reinforces its value and application. From the late George Whalin’s: “Be the best. It’s the only market that’s not crowded,” to Richard Branson’s “Business has to give people enriching, rewarding lives—or it’s simply not worth doing,” there is both charm and wisdom in what Peters shares.

He has his own important perspective to share as well.

“I urge you to hire the brightest young women (and a few young men) to help you deal with all this madness....” Get those young people on the Board and the executive team. “It’s ‘the people’ who do the work. It’s ‘the people’ who generate the growth and profit. It’s ‘the people’ that matter.” And for the future of successful business, we need young people to help us navigate a world of change that happens much more rapidly than we were once accustomed to.

I’m finding Dear CEO to be a little treasure house of the practical and inspirational. Business leaders can use both; seldom is such a diverse range of perspective packed under a single roof.

Whitney Johnson is one of the world's leading management thinkers (Thinkers50), author of the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work and host of the Disrupt Yourself Podcast. You can sign up for her newsletter here.