Bill Canady says a CEO has 4 seconds to respond to a crisis: state the number, its cost, the fix, who owns it, and the deadline. Leaders who soften decisions kill their role. Prophets act on concrete data. Critics just complain.
What you do in the next 90 seconds decides whether that role survives the rest of the year. If you soften it, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's context here. Let's take it offline. The role's dead. Might as well shoot it. It's dead that afternoon, and every person in the room just learned in real time that truth in this company is negotiable if you're senior enough. If you say, that's the number, what's the cost? What's the countermeasure? Who owns it and by when. Those are all super important. The role is installed. That's it. That's the whole intervention. 4 seconds of being a CEO. Heavy wears the crown. One more thing, so nobody mistakes what this is. The prophet is not a critic. The prophet is the person whose job it is to be right rather than popular. Right, not popular. A critic brings a problem. A prophet brings a number, a cause, and a proposal, and then goes and does the work when the room picks one. That's a pretty handy role to have.
