Honestly, compentcy around the product line and customer base, humility to reach out to the experts in the company for decisions, industry connections, actually being available and listening to employee feedback and confidence in decisive action born out of the latter items.
look up a guy named Dan Price. Dude saw his Ice Cream company failing and chose to slash his pay exponentially to offer living wages and benefits to everyone else, and business fucking boomed for it. There are literal chapters in economics textbooks about what he did.
Unfortunately, that dude was relatively recently charged with SA allegations / rape.
His wife also accused him of beating her.
I believe charges were dropped but it definitely cast a shadow over his public good guy persona.
It speaks a lot about the justice system fairness that even if charges dropped no one believes it.
Typically I agree but I believe this was repeat allegations from multiple parties. If it was only one person and it was dropped, maybe he deserves the benefit of the doubt. But fool me twice, shame on me.
That part is less about the justice system and more a likely triangulation of him probably being not so great, at best. Plenty of people got charges dropped or “redeemed” on a technicality who are definitely guilty.
Be competent at what your company actually does (as opposed to viewing everything through spreadsheets). View people as assets not as cost factors. See it as your job to empower your employees to do what they’re good at. Have a long term perspective of how you want to develop the company and what you see as success factors (as opposed to just staring at quarterly numbers). tl;dr: don’t be an MBA.
The best CEOs I’ve seen (across all sizes of corporations) have a passion for the product/services they sell and the customers they sell to.
