Are you CEO material?

Today I spoke at Harvard Business School's Entrepreneurship Club. This was a really enjoyable experience because it gave me an opportunity to interact with future entrepreneurs. The club has 450 student members and likes to invite local business leaders to talk about what it takes to start and grow new companies.

I started my talk with the 6 essentials of a startup CEO's life which I called the "6P's":

• Planning: Never stop doing this. There's no substitute for strategic thinking, but planning goes on everyday starting with outlining “ToDo’s” for the day/week each morning and interspersed into many different disciplines in the company and activities.

• Proving: Making sure your board, employees, analysts and the press knows about your progress against plan, and company's direction and performance.

• People: Invest in your employees. Encourage them. Train them. Help them to grow professionally and your company will reap the benefits.

• Producing: Whether a product or service customer alignment, differentiation and quality are all keys to successful ventures.

• P&L: Oversee pricing is an important and pivotal business activity that CEOs should be involved with and retain. Another key is driving or monitoring demand generation – depending on the stage of the company. Lastly, a CEO has to be the initiator of cost savings even when a strong CFO is in place.

• Personal: Don't neglect your family. As it relates to emotional intelligence (so-called "EQ"), learn to recognize patterns to identify problems and communicate solutions.

In my experience, a lot of CEOs neglect the 6^th P on this list. Don't do that. As the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

There are also some more general Dos and Don'ts that I presented to the club. I learned some of these lessons the hard way, and I hope the aspiring business leaders in the club will learn my mistakes.

DOs:

• Do what you are good at and love to do. That might be the CEO job -- but then again it might not!

• Do hire people who have more expertise in certain areas than you.

• Do identify your personal weaknesses and address them, and then identify more weaknesses. Rinse and repeat.

• Do get lots of advice from your board, advisors, coaches, mentors and others, but then make your own decisions.

• Do come to accept you have to drive the company in order to achieve and overachieve every single day.

DON'Ts

• Don’t letothers' expectations or some “dream job” picture lead you to pursue the CEO job.

• Don’t operate under the belief that strategy alone is the key to startup success. There are many keys.

• Don’t assume that there are formulas for exits, challenges, competition, etc. Every situation is unique.

• Don’t place your interests before the interests of the board, executive management team, your rank-and-file employees and investors.

• Don’t give up your personal life. There's more to life than work, and being a well-rounded person is key to avoiding burnout. Don't be another supernova in a suit.

I leave you with some words from that sage of the business world, Michael J. Fox, who played the enterprising Alex P. Keaton on the 80s TV sitcom Family Ties: “I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.”

Wise advice indeed.

A new face for an old friend

Evolution happens when you least expect it. And sometimes it forces you to rename your blog.

Long story short, recently I was looking for ways of improving my blog when I happened across a couple of CEO blogs. They got me to take a long, hard look at my blog. Before I knew it, Blougtopia was a distant memory and Doug Levin's CEO Blog was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

Don't get nervous about the new name. This won't be just any CEO blog. Honest. You see, my new goal as a blogging CEO is attaining “Godiness.” Or getting as close as any human being can.

The term Godiness comes from Seth Godin, former CEO of Yoyodyne (before he sold it to Yahoo) and marketing blogger extraordinaire. Blogging back in 2004 -- at a time when most people thought a blog was the place where you got cranberries -- Godin warned his readers about CEO blogs. He said the following: “Here's the problem. Blogs work when they are based on: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness and Controversy, (maybe Utility if you want six). Does this sound like a CEO to you?”

I want to prove that Seth's got CEO blogs – or at least my CEO blog – all wrong. So I’m going to try to live up to Seth’s ideals and show the world that CEO blogs can deliver true ROI. Through my newly renamed blog, I will continue to to delve deeper into the blogging mindset as I try to achieve Godiness.

It won't be easy at times. Sometimes I'll feel like phoning it in – or at least using too many compound adjectives. But you can help. In those immortal words of songstress Dionne Warwick, say a little prayer for me. And please keep reading.

My Psalm

We all remember the Little League trophy we received or the ribbon we won at the three-legged race back in third grade. But I have to say that nothing is both so gratifying, and so humbling, as being an adult who has been recognized by his peers.

I experienced these emotions when I was named CEO of the Year by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council last night, an organization “dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship and promoting the success of companies that develop and deploy technology across industry sectors.”

I'm not reporting this news to brag. Far from it. In accepting the award, I did not have the opportunity to express my feelings and explain my perspective of the value of it.

I'm a firm believer in the notion that success is a team effort – all the hard work by Team Black Duck resulted in this award. I was just the team member who got the recognition. Like Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ quarterback, his offensive line makes him successful each week, and the Pats' “D” delivers up the ball and minimizes the points of the other team. The hard work and dedication of Team Black Duck inspires me and is responsible for realizing the vision of composite software development within enterprises and among a growing community of software developers.

A business is a wonderful thing to grow, develop and expand. Now that the dust has settled from the award, I look forward to working with Team Black Duck to take our vision forward into new markets, with new products and greatly expanded horizons.

And let all the people say, "Amen."

From Russia with Love – Part 2

My short stay in Moscow was at the super-expensive Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow ($900 per night; благодарность – thank you – Hyatt frequent flyer points). The hotel personnel were very helpful and always service-minded. There is a shortage of business hotels in Moscow, resulting in astronomical lodging rates at those that are available. For example, the Moscow Holiday Inn’s least expensive room is $350 per night.

I went to both GUM (left) and ZUM – the largest department stores in Russia. GUM is located in Moscow's Red Square in a huge, ornate building (constructed 1889-93) that once housed more than 1,000 shops. The name is an acronym "State Department Store" in Russian. GUM now contains about 150 shops selling food, clothing, all manner of consumer electronic devices and and home appliances, and other stuff. It functions more like a Western-style shopping mall than a department store. These Soviet-era retail dinosaurs are thriving – a manifestation of Russia’s current oil-based growth economy.

Before departing for St. Petersburg, I went for a quick dinner at Café Pushkin, an expensive and pretentious restaurant with a wonderful mix of French and Russian cuisine for celebrities and the well-to-do. The borscht was amazingly delicious and totally unique. Served hot (the style favored in Eastern and Central Europe), this sweet soup features sliced beets, slivers of goose meat, and sections of apple, and is served with a large portion of sour cream and thick dark bread. I also had caviar and blinis (light-as-air buckwheat pancakes) as my main course, although veal, pork, fish, and many other entrées adorned the menu. The desert selection looked sumptuous.

With Moscow behind me, I left for St. Petersburg and IBM’s 2007 Business Leadership Forum and encountered another drama along the way.

From Russia with Love – Part 1

I’m in Russia for IBM’s 2007 Business Leadership Forum, a meeting of leaders from across business, industry, government, and academia. This year innovation and the challenges facing global businesses are the center of discussion.

I will write more about this great event in blog entries to follow, but first there was some drama I encountered after touching down in Moscow. Yes, you guessed it: Air France lost my bag between Charles de Gaulle and Moscow. It was nearly impossible to connect with someone in the AF offices in Moscow or at Moscow International Airport to determine where in the world my bag was and when I was going to be reunited with it. I was unshaved and in the same clothes for a day plus when I asked a Russian friend from a leading American company for help. I felt like I was in a Narimanov-era movie. Finally I got my bag back a couple of hours before I left Moscow. How do you spell relief in Russian: вспомогательный.

While in Moscow I did some sightseeing. Turns out that many building facades in Moscow are new or beautifully re-coated and restored. The insides of these buildings are usually not restored, and they remain as they were during Soviet era.

I visited a boat basin immediately outside Moscow with a commemorative building erected by Stalin in 1933-37. There were twelve huge painted plates detailing the period’s accomplishments cemented into the supporting pillars of the building; they depicted monuments, large buildings, and other “wonders” of Stalin-era. It was an astonishingly Stalinesque remnant – real, yet seemingly fictitious.

Anytime I interacted with a Russian in Moscow it seemed like a bureaucratic experience. Permission was sought from a superior for everything. It took several questions and angles of inquiry to get things done. Motivation was a problem in other cases; in other cases there was no sense of empowerment and independent initiative. I wondered if it would be the same in St. Petersburg.

The Kremlin (above) lived up to its billing. The Diamond Fund, churches, and museums located on the Kremlin campus were amazing. Lenin’s Tomb was not open; he was at his да́ча (dacha) on the Baltic. Too bad: I would have asked him to borrow a razor.

A Visit to the CEO Woodshed

A CEO that I admire told me today that I was out of line for asking a question of one of his company’s employees that I should have directed to him. It was a CEO-level communication that, as he made clear to me, had sent the wrong message.

I blog about this because after trying to remember the question I asked and conversation I was in, the discomfort I felt at his assertion, my need to understand how things work, and dealing with the realization I did something unintentional but out-of-line, it felt really good to get this feedback. I want to share the realization that it felt good to me to get direct, unvarnished feedback from someone I admire and from peer. He was right, I was out-of-line, and he was well within his rights to take me to the CEO woodshed.

After this experience, I came to appreciate my own observation that getting and giving feedback is a big part of the CEO experience, and people react variously to it. Some people are simply afraid of CEOs and getting this type of feedback; some people are simply bad at taking feedback and providing feedback, and some people are perfectly comfortable getting feedback and giving feedback.

My two favorite and consistent sources of feedback are other Black Duck board members, company advisors and members of the executive staff. (I personally love executive sessions at Black Duck board meetings, even though they are often rushed.)

Getting this new source of feedback was cathartic and ultimately, refreshing.

I was thinking this weekend how much business travel I've done in '06. So I went to a site that Danese "Diva" Cooper wrote about in her blog.

This does not show how many times I have flied to CA from Boston over the last year. Eeech!