Learning To Flex Your Leadership Muscles. Before I left salesforce.com to start Okta, CEO Marc Benioff gave me some advice.
He said, “Todd, to be a great CEO, you'll need to learn how to be a great leader, not just a great manager.” At that time, I didn’t think much of that suggestion. But over the past three years in founding and growing my own company, I keep coming back to those words and have found them to be hugely valuable. What I've learned--and I suppose what Marc was trying to tell me--is that building a successful company takes an entirely different combination of skills than I was used to showcasing as the head of engineering. 10 Ways To Craft Your Resume For Ultra-Short Attention Spans. 4 Ways To Keep Great Ideas From Getting Stuck In The Pipeline.
More than ever, innovation is a real, tangible competency at many Fortune 500 companies, which are investing substantially in their innovation capabilities to build new businesses, explore new technologies, and find new avenues to creating value.
However, for every company that has produced substantial impact through innovation, there are many others that have struggled to produce real results. Tempted by the hope of disruptive products and beyond-the-core growth, less successful business leaders discover that making innovation happen at a large company is harder than they imagined. After a few years--usually three--they find that their budgets are dramatically cut and their priorities realigned.