Cameron Herold says CEOs waste time on random content when they should pick one specific problem, find the proven book on it, and practice it repeatedly. He points to Topgrading for hiring, Meeting Sucks for meetings, Five Dysfunctions for team performance, and recommends using mastermind groups to find what actually works.
Chapters
It is actually able to almost follow a manual to be a CEO or a CEO of a company. The problem is that often we just don't do it. So I have a CEO that I'm just starting to coach, and she's running about a $12 million company right now. We're doing our first call today, and one of the things she said is that being a CEO is kind of similar to being a mom, that there's no operating manual for it. And I'm about to tell her on our call that we're going to do in about an hour or two. Maybe she'll see this before, but there is actually a manual for being a CEO. It's just that each chapter of the manual is broken down and found in different places. So When I was 16 years old, my dad told me I would never be smart enough to figure it out on my own and that my R and D had to stand for rip off and duplicate. So if you actually try to figure out every part of being a CEO or every part of being a COO or every part of being a leader, if you try to figure it out on your own, you're gonna be banging your head against the wall. You're gonna be like a fly trying to get out the window. Because the reality is millions of really, really smart people have already put that information out there for you. All you need to do is read it and follow it. So the problem is for most people, most entrepreneurs, most business leaders, is we're devouring too much content that's not tied to the actual information that we're working on right now. So let's say as an example, you were working on a project to hire someone. Don't say that there's no operating manual for that. Read the book Top Grading or follow the information in the book who, which is a shorter, more condensed version of Top Grading by Brad and Jeff Smart. The information that's in those two books are really all you're going to need around interviewing and hiring. Even in my invest in your leaders course, I did a full module on interviewing. In Double Double, there's a full chapter on interviewing and hiring. So the information is out there. The key is you have to find where that information is, but it is available. It's available for every single part of your business. If you don't know how to do meetings, read Meeting Suck or read Death by Meetings by Pat Lencioni. If you're struggling with getting your team to operate at a high level, read five dysfunctions of a team, start using Social media to ask questions of your tribe or join some mastermind groups like get into the entrepreneurs organization, join Vistage, put your COO into the CO alliance and ask the communities what they reading or what they've learned from to actually solve the problem. Or work on the opportunity that's in front of you and then just do that. You know one of the problems I have with, with reading a book and reading a book and reading a book is it's often miscellaneous information that you're learning instead of reading a book for what you're working on right now. So identify the problem, identify the opportunity, read through it, have your managers read through it and just do that information. It may not be perfect but it's certainly going to get you 80 or 85% of the way there. And it's way better than trying to figure it out on your own. It's certainly way better than flying blind and it's also way better than feeling like there's no operating manual because there really is an operating manual for every single aspect of your business. You just have to find the information or ask your tribe where that information is and what you should do. You know, back in the day when I was in university we had to go to the library and look up books on the Dewey Decimal system and go and hopeful hopefully find that book in the library. And often it was checked out by somebody else that was looking for that same information. Now you have the Internet, you have the availability to read books, you've got the availability to listen to books. But I would actually read the same book over and over again until you're doing what it tells you to do. You know, read the book, meeting suck and then read it again in three months and then read it again in three months. It's only about a three hour read but that book will show you how to run meetings. Read the book who? And then three months from now read it again. Or if you're hiring somebody next week, read it again. Now the key is to devour that content and go through it a few times, much like you would have in school to learn the information and then practice the information. One of the modules in my Invest in youn Leaders course is on adult learning and it talks about how adults need to have the abstract concept. So the abstract conceptualization, that's when you're reading about something or studying it in a course, you're learning the ideas and then it's the active experimentation. So it's practicing trying it out, role playing it, maybe trying it out with your team, and then you have the concrete experience of actually doing so, putting those systems in place and doing them. And then the fourth stage is reflective observation, where you think about what you just learned and tried and practiced and how it went, and then cycle back through it again. Which is why I believe that we need to read far less books, but read the same books over and over again until we're using that information. So if you want to understand the manual, to be a CEO or a COO or a leader, you need to read the manual a bunch of times, you need to practice the manual a bunch of times, and you need to realize that all the different chapters of the manual are going to be found in different places. But one of the things that made me most successful as an entrepreneur when I first started my first business back in 1981, was I actually had an operating manual. They gave me the franchise manual for college pro painters. And I was so scared of failing that I just did every single thing that I found in that manual. And that's pretty much what I practice today, is I try to take the best systems that I know of that are simple, that are easy to put in place, and I just do those. And I don't try to come up with a better one. I just try to find those systems. But, yes, the operating manual does exist. You just have to go out and find it, try it out.
