“Managing the Fate of your Long-Term Vision and Strategy”

In the wake of 2010, members and guests of the Board of Veteran CEOs (BoV) had faced numerous challenges for their respective corporations. For the year, the BoV served as a support structure to help participating CEOs solve these issues.

The recent year-end November Forum served as a last stand against lingering problems of the year and a platform for discussing long-term issues and questions. This roundtable discussion was a collaborative, peer-to-peer exchange between sitting CEOs and two Advisory members of the Board. Each sitting CEO’s challenges were opened up for an interactive conversation among the group, including the Advisory members.

For this Forum, the topics of the challenges surrounded themes of managing long-term strategy and developing trust throughout the enterprise.

To initiate the structured dialogue, Chairman Ted Santos and Co-Moderator Noah Blumenthal spoke regarding trends and observations in the business climate. Ted spoke of a study in which many Fortune 100 CEOs that were interviewed had the consensus opinion that strategy was dead. Noah contributed with the impacts and correlations of technology overload on neurology and its hindrance on productive thinking. This introduction led to the first challenge of a sitting CEO in attendance.

One of the CEOs stated, “We are soul searching to answer the question of why our company exists. We think about what we are good at and how do we expand that. How do we clearly communicate that in a way that it resonates with employees so they know exactly why we do what we do? More importantly, to our customers to help them better understand why they should be our customers.”

Steve Rice, retired CEO of Stamford Bank and Advisory member for the BOV, mentioned that a CEO may have to revisit long term strategy everyday in order to stay relevant.

Richard Goeglein, also a BOV Advisory member and Chairman of Pinnacle Entertainment, replied that there are only a “handful of companies that have been around for a century”; he said this was because in most companies management “does not want to talk about things that they have not done before so as to not appear foolish”.

What had surfaced from there was the concept of trust among the executive team as a necessity for moving the company along. One of the sitting CEOs with success in this area explained the processes and techniques he used to foster and manage this trust and openness in executive meetings. Next, it was debated whether it was about trust, survival, or creating chaos for company activity.

Mr. Goeglein brought up the importance of proper “recognition and reward” in a developing high-performance, trusting leadership team.

One of the sitting CEOs brought up management structure techniques to do this as well.

Further discussed were the long-term implications of strategy and core competencies arising from post-merger environments.

The dynamics of trust and the CEO’s role in developing that trust in the resulting leadership team were explored in this context.

At the meeting’s conclusion, there was definitive impact on what was learned in the meeting as well as what practical solutions they would take back to their offices.