Blog #3

Blog #3 - Building an Unbeatable Management Team & Organization That Delivers
              - Assessing Your Venture’s Social Impact


I want to address what the underlining message is in all of the articles we read for this week, and that is leadership. We can talk about leadership in the form of one person on the team, a leader who is in the shadows, or a leader in the sense of the whole team or the team's vision. But regardless of what leader we are referring to, there is always one there creating the organized chaos for the success of the business, team, and product.

"14 Ways To Be A Great Start Up CEO," by Jason Baptiste, talks about the most well known leaders out there: the CEOs. But there are a lot of things to be said about CEOs. Take the "Apple A" and "Apple B" cases written by Tom Watson under the supervision of Professor Mary Crossan, Richard Ivey School of Business. These two cases talk about the infamous CEO, Steve Jobs, but in two completely different terms. One being the remarkable, visionary that Steve Jobs was, and the other the mean, narcissistic, control freak of a CEO. Neither case was right and neither case was wrong, but they both had an underlining message. That the vision is what held Apple together and created it's success. You could say that without Steve Jobs the vision would have been ruined or lost, but it was still the vision that so many people saw making Apple the frontrunner in the world's technology market.

So how do you make something count? Make something stand out? Regardless of tactics, marketing, products, etc., the vision must come first and shine above it all. When creating a business, there will b ups and plenty of downs, but you and your team must have something to always rely on. Even if it just a saying, it's a meaning and the starting point to what created your success up to that point. Never let go of the vision, just try not to be an a**hole when enforcing it (cough cough Steve Jobs).




(Sorry to not have the links for the articles, but I was given the articles to read with the promise I would not share them as they are property of the school. Regardless, I felt those two articles really resonated with what this weeks readings were.)