Opinion CEO By JACQUES MATTHEIJ 18 hacker bits
Companies going under is a real pity, not only for the founders and investors. The real losers in those cases are the employees, the suppliers and the customers. They bet on the wrong horse for something that will now materially affect their lives. They feel (in some cases rightly so) that their trust has been misplaced, and in some cases, they will feel duped or defrauded. When the company is doing ok, there is money in the bank. When you’re hiring and the sun is shining, anybody can be CEO of a company. But when the bank accounts are running dry, when you have to fire people company might have survived. Before we go any further, let’s take a look at what it is that a CEO actually does, what room to maneuver there is, what you’re obliged to do, what you are allowed to do and what you’re explicitly forbidden to do. Once that is out of the way, we’ll get to some more general advice. The actual legal situation of what it means to be a CEO varies from country to country. I’ve tried to keep the text presented here general enough that you should get some (or significant) mileage out of it no matter where you are. But if you currently are CEO of a company As a CEO, you are ultimately responsible for whatever happens to and in your company... In this article I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEOs (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves, in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases, charges of misconduct or worse. My hope is that this will somehow help save a few companies by causing you, the CEO, to change direction before it is too late to do so. As seen from the outside, the job of a CEO seems to be composed of equal components motivator, ambassador, networker and the person that ‘sets the example.’ And that’s all true but there is also another side to being a CEO, one that is much more formalized and governed by all kinds of rules. In my practice I come across all kinds of companies (and all sizes) and unfortunately sometimes I also come across companies that are sick, some so sick that they will not survive. The reason I’m writing this article is that recently I again was sent in to try to save a company from going under and I feel that if the CEO of that company had read an article like this maybe six months ago, this whole disaster could have been avoided. and when it seems as if there is just no end to the bad news, it really matters who is in the driving seat. It seems such a great thing, to be the master of a company but it is a double edged sword. With all that freedom and executive power comes the flip side of that coin: executive responsibility. Companies being sick is in and of itself not a rare thing, but what bothers me is that, in many of these cases, the company is much sicker than it has to be. The wounds are, to a large extent, self-inflicted, and, if only someone had had the presence of mind to change direction when it was still possible, the and you are yourself unclear about your role or if you feel that anything here clashes with the way you see things, then I would strongly suggest you hire a competent lawyer in your jurisdiction for a couple of hours. Let them explain as clearly as possible (and where applicable in your own language) what the local situation is. Quite a few companies that end up dead do not die of external causes. Plenty of them are murdered from the inside, either by bad decisions made on purpose, by inaction, malice or incompetence and it is frustrating to see this happen when it could have been so easily avoid- hacker bits 19