Our founder has exited and innovation is dying. Help!

Dear Aunty B,

We are an innovative mid-size firm whose founder has recently exited. We have always been a very creative bunch of people and the founder always had a very clear strategic outlook, took the best ideas and implemented them. We now have a new CEO whose prior experience was to run businesses in other industries. Now our meetings seem to go around and around and the CEO appears to have no idea how to prioritise the ideas or plan.

So we end up not doing any of them or starting them only to lose focus. This is really frustrating and people are grumbling that the meetings which have always been fun and very productive are now a waste of time.

Help!
Melbourne

Dear Help,

Gee. Give your new CEO some time. Do you have any idea how finely tuned the finances of a fast growing company are? As businesses grow, they consume cash like a teenager with a bag of biscuits.

Think of it like this – as the business grows, you have to add IT capacity, accounting capacity, customer service capacity, operational capacity – and basically all those costs are not particularly bring in new revenue – they just save the business from collapsing into chaos and getting fined by the ATO.

So when you eager creatives pile into the meeting with a stream of ideas and expect to be patted on the head, your boss is thinking that there is no room for mistakes. Yes it might be a good idea, but what is the strategy to create the demand? What impact will it have on operations? How can the business deliver what it has promised without trashing its name? How can the idea be implemented to minimise risk?

So first thing you must do is show your boss that you understand how the business works and the costs, risks and analysis required in implementing new ideas. Don’t stop your valuable stream of ideas: just understand that the new CEO is still building trust in you and understanding the business and the industry. Make sure you go to meetings with fewer but better thought out ideas. And share with her/him stories of the ones that have worked, how they were implemented and the thinking and analysis that went on behind the scenes.

Good Luck!
Your Aunty B