Hi,

I asked 100 CEOs this question, and here are the top 4 answers:

​ ​Gyve Safavi, Co-Founder and CEO at SURI, an award-winning, eco-friendly electric toothbrush company

“The biggest shift for me this year has been how I respond to things going wrong versus going right.
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In an early-stage company, getting things wrong is almost a part of the job. Sometimes it’s small, but sometimes it really stings. I used to carry a lot of emotion in those moments – delays could feel like failure, mistakes felt personal.
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I’ve made an effort to change that, and now I try to strip the emotion out of what goes wrong and move quickly to ‘Okay, what’s the best next move?’ Most problems are fixable, and can often turn into improvements if you handle them the right way.
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At the same time, I’ve started doing the opposite with wins. When something goes well, even small things, I let myself feel it more. It's easy to spend too much time dwelling on the negative and not celebrating the positive. And in close-knit teams, positive energy really travels.

​Jambu Palaniappan is CEO of Checkatrade, a site connecting customers with approved local tradespeople

“I don’t love the phrase but I’m a big believer in ‘dog-fooding’: having teams taste what they’re putting into the market by experiencing the product as customers. When I was at Uber, every leader had to complete a number of Uber trips annually to get closer to the driver experience. I now plan to get my team spending more time with the product in daily life.

It relates to something I was reminded of last year: that being in the detail matters. As a two-sided marketplace we have distinct customers to serve: consumers and tradespeople. Excellent teams are building the products and services we offer and I trust them implicitly. That lets me get out of the weeds and focus on the bigger picture, but it’s vital to keep close to how our product evolves and customers use it.

Shepherding a company as CEO can mean you get pulled away from the product nuts and bolts, and sometimes I came to feel less in touch with our platform. But the best results come from getting that balance of deep-dive and distance right. While giving our team the space to work their magic, I stay hands-on from idea, to product wireframes and testing through to execution.

I’m also making it my mission to maximise every opportunity to dive into product detail, from user testing sessions to rolling up my sleeves in design reviews. My mantra this year is going to be ‘get out of the boardroom’ – the most interesting things are usually happening elsewhere.”

​ ​Richard Davies is the CEO of Allica Bank, a bank designed for small-to-medium sized businesses

“Strategy alone doesn’t win markets. Speed does.

I started my career as a strategy consultant, so I grew up believing the ‘right’ way to run a business was through multi-year, detailed spreadsheets and slides that explain where you’ll be in three-to-five years and precisely how you’ll get there.

But in the last decade, through working in hyper-growth companies, I realised it’s all about good strategy. And then, the best execution. A lot of people get sucked into a fake sense of top-down control by having those ultra-specific, multi-year documents – the reality is that control is an illusion. In any high growth business, things will quickly diverge.

That’s why granular execution is everything. For me that comes down to:

1. Rapid speed of decision-making on all reversible decisions (with decisions right on average at a portfolio level)
2. Implementing successfully at speed

From 1 and 2 you then rapidly gain feedback that allows you to take further decisions, implement, and continuously ratchet up. This is the flywheel that builds compounding competitive advantage in all great businesses, in my view.

So, while those documents are a necessary evil – they help align stakeholders, or flush out bad assumptions. I’d say it’s better to prioritise developing the bottom-up capability of speed and quality of execution.

This takes the right talent, culture and org structure, and technical infrastructure to enable, and this should be the core focus of all founders or CEOs.”

​Nicole Otto is CEO at Ruggable, a design-led, washable rug company, and previously served as Vice President of Nike Direct North America

“Over the last year, I’ve come to realise that my most important job is to ensure the entire company is consumer obsessed. To succeed, we must have a shared understanding of who that consumer is and what they care about.
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Early in my career I learned that fixating on the consumer experience was the key to unlocking growth – and I still hold that belief true today. But as organisations grow, it becomes surprisingly easy to lose sight of who you’re actually building for, and the day-to-day demands of running a business can pull teams inward, toward process, structure, and optimisation. At Ruggable, we had teams doing strong work independently, but the connective tissue between product, creative, and marketing wasn’t always tight enough to deliver the best possible experience.

We made changes organisationally to make this happen: we expanded the CMO role to oversee not only marketing, but also brand, creative, and all textile creative as well – not to centralise for the sake of control, but to create a true creative home. One place where product design, creative point of view, and customer experience are developed together, rather than handed off across silos.

We’ve already seen meaningful improvements: our styling and photo shoots have become more cohesive because the same team shaping the product and creative point of view is also responsible for how that story comes to life visually. Decisions are faster, and the work is more coherent. Championing the consumer has helped us get where we need to be.”

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Talk soon,

Steven

73 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3QQ
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