A CEO Only Does Three Things: Finding Your Focus in the C-Suite

Where should CEOs focus their attention? On those select areas where our unique skills, experience, reputation, and authority can have the biggest impact on the long-term success or our endeavors.

the more decisions we have to make over the course of a day, the worse decisions we make at the end of the day.

Being the CEO of an enterprise shouldn’t be like being a catcher on a baseball team. Not everything that happens in the company should pass through your inbox.

The decisions the CEO should make are those that only he has the ability, information, and vision to make. In other words, if a decision can be made by others, it should be.

I messed up a lot. With each failure, I tried to stand up stronger.

“A CEO focuses on only three things. He sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. He recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. He makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”

Culture. People. Numbers. Properly focused, a CEO does these three things and nothing else. Every task of every day should relate directly to improving one of the pillars of this Trinity. Everything that distracts from the Trinity should be delegated to someone

Being the CEO is hard; it’s three times as hard as the next-hardest job in the organization.

A good CEO takes the credit for nothing and the blame for everything.

Every CEO makes decisions. It’s central to the job description. What’s most important is to make decisions with intent; decisions that matter; decisions whose outcomes have a positive effect on your Culture, People, and Numbers—decisions that propel your business forward.

For leaders, self-awareness is the foundation of self-management and decision-making. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was perhaps

For leaders, self-awareness is the foundation of self-management and decision-making.

Introspection is one of the most effective ways for the CEO to gain self-awareness. Introspection requires us to examine our thoughts, feelings, and self-image with the goal of identifying what makes us tick. Introspection enables us not only to better understand our motivations but also to determine what is most deserving of our focus.

The life you have today—effortless or challenging, energizing or enervating, profitable or bankrupt—is the outward manifestation of interior causes.

The life you have today—effortless or challenging, energizing or enervating, profitable or bankrupt—is the outward manifestation of interior causes. These causes are embedded deep within your inner self, and you must discover the beliefs that sustain them. This process takes you deeper into your own psychology than most People ever go, and the results will be profoundly altering.

see our own story than by any abstract, quantified, or even rational decision-making process. But how many of us ever stop to examine, deconstruct, and rewrite our personal stories? Only by doing so can we ever reach our own authentic selves and be confident in our own choices, choices that are focused on an end goal, directed with proper intent and authentically expressed. Ron knew that the choices we make form our behaviors,

see our own story than by any abstract, quantified, or even rational decision-making process. But how many of us ever stop to examine, deconstruct, and rewrite our personal stories? Only by doing so can we ever reach our own authentic selves and be confident in our own choices, choices that are focused on an end goal, directed with proper intent and authentically expressed.

Our life then is a summation of the choices we make, the behaviors they engender, and the consequences that result.

it makes sense to focus not on the effects but on the causes that produce them.

Taking that action means making a choice: do we live with things as they are, or do we commit body, mind, and soul to making them right?