1979 – Rethinking Leadership for Maximum Impact with The CEO Project’s Jim Schleckser

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1:05With us right now, Dr. Jim Schlexer. Jim, it's great to have you. You are the CEO and managing partner of The CEO Project, where you create CEO peer groups and advisory groups for CEOs. Your website is theceoproject.com. You are also the author of the book, Great CEOs Are Lazy, and you're the host of The Lazy CEO Project. Jim, it's great to have you. All true. Nice to meet you, Josh. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Yes, absolutely. So let's talk about the kind of the work that you do and, you know, what the CEO project is. Yep. And you could argue that, you know, all of us are projects, right?

1:49But we forget that CEOs are not the fully formed offer the day they get the job. And so the really, I think, insightful ones say, I got to keep working on myself. And hence the term CEO project. What we do is we build CEO peer groups, call them mastermind groups around those CEOs, like size, like complexity. We pair them up with a CEO advisor that is a former CEO. They've run companies at that scale before. And we help them make the most critical decisions in their business and keep them focused on what we call the point of constraint or the kink in the hose. and just for one second on that, the point of constraint is the highest economic impact item you can spend time on.

2:30It's the thing that's getting in the way of you doubling the size of your business and that's where we spend our time and it makes a huge difference in their outcomes. Yeah, tell me about the kinks in the hose that CEOs are either responsible, we're either responsible for the kink or responsible for getting the kink out. Yep, and there's really two, like people get the job and they're like, okay, I'm not sure what the job is I got an MBA. I get marketing. I get finance. But what's the job of the CEO? You never get taught that. And so this really talks to what the really excellent CEOs do differently than others.

3:03They find the kink and they open it up. Now, this is all based on what's called theory of constraints. And the idea is in any system, you can name any system, there is a point of constraint that controls the performance of the whole system. So think about a garden hose. I'm trying to get water out the end, all of a sudden there's a kink in the hose. Well, what controls how much water goes out of that hose? The kink. The whole rest of the hose is doing its job just perfectly. But my job, if I want water out the end of the hose, is go find the kink and open it up. Same exact thing exists in your business.

3:40Your job as a CEO is to find the kink and open it up. So the kink can exist really in three areas and really only three, funny enough. It's not that hard. the business model, what you do for whom, the margin, the recurring revenue, the nature of the market you're in, all that stuff, the talent you have around the business, the caliber of people around you, your advisors, your leadership team, your middle management, and then the systems and processes, both the IT, but also your standard operating procedures and your values as part of your process and systems. Somewhere in that mix is the point of constraint.

4:16Your job is to find it and change what you need to to open it up to performance. Yeah. You know, you recently talked about, you know, the difference between having A players and A-plus players within our organizations. So as CEOs, how can we attract and help create an environment where, you know, we have those maybe potential A-plus players to really step into their greatness in that way. And, you know, you don't need a huge number of these A-plus players. You need a limited number of them in the really high-impact positions in your company. And everybody has seen it happen, right? If you ever had software programmers, there's always this one kind of weird, super genius in the corner that codes 10x what everybody else does, right?

5:10or a salesperson, your top two salespeople sell what the whole rest of the sales organization sell. Those are your A pluses. And unfortunately, there's no great way to find them. But I can tell you this. It is too important a job to delegate to HR. A plus players will only come if you as the CEO are personally involved in recruiting them. Because why are they going to come? Because they love the mission. They love we're trying to get done. They want to be part of it. And then once they're there, Dan Pink talks about it. You need to give them autonomy. All right, here's a little backyard. Go do.

5:44How you see fit, the way you want to just go do. Purpose. I talked about purpose. That's why they come to your business. And then mastery. They want to become excellent at their craft. You have to invest in them to allow them to develop and grow and become more valuable. Now, some CEOs go, oh, geez, Jim, you know, if I invest in this gal and then she leaves me, what do I do? I'm like, listen, if you don't invest in her, she's going to leave. So you must invest in her. It's your only shot at keeping somebody who's an A-plus player around. So autonomy, purpose, and mastery, keep them, recruiting them.

6:18You've got to be personally involved. Only way to get it done because you're the only one who can show that vision in a way that's going to bring them on board. Jim, your book is called Great CEOs Are Lazy. That might be jarring to some folks hearing that title. Can you share a little bit about the thesis and kind of what the core message is of the book? Well, there is a chance that I meant that to happen. So what I found, you know, I've interviewed like thousands and thousands of CEOs doing this CEO advisory work that we do. And what I found is I could ask a couple of questions and I could tell if I had a good CEO or a pretty average CEO on my hands or maybe below average.

7:00One is how many hours do you work a week? And if the answer is 80, red flag. And then you go, where do you apply your time in the business? They go, well, I kind of spread it around the time, little here, little there, little there. We call that peanut buttering your time across the business, sort of spreading it nice and even like you would peanut butter. And all that tells you is you will never get anything interesting done. What a really good CEO says, I work 40, 50 hours a week, sometimes 60 when things are going on. Right now, I'm really, really focused on my sales processes because they're not yielding the results I need.

7:34So I'm spending like a third or 40 % of my time on that. If I came back and talked to that CEO six months from now, he or she would go, hey, I cleared out that sales process thing. That's working like a charm right now. Now I've got a supply chain problem. So I'm spending a lot of time on supply chain, the talent, the processes, trying to get that lined up so I can keep up with this new super duper sales organization I put in place. so they're kind i like in it you ever seen those guys that keep the plate spinning on the sticks on the it's a little bit like that you're running back and forth this one for a little bit this one for a little bit this one for a little bit but very thoughtful that when i spend time there it's going to make a big difference in the outcome of the company so that's what the good ones do so you can do the job in 50 hours a week it doesn't take 80 and that's what lazy ceo nobody's very if you're going to do it in 20 right let's be fair it's not a 20 hour a week job but but you can do 40 or 50, sometimes 55, but 80 is not required.

8:28Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and I would argue that 80 is going to be really hard to maintain. Certainly, you know, in those hours that require the best of us, the best aspects of us, you know, again, if we're spread too thin, then, then obviously those really pivotal moments, I think many of us would argue we're likely going to be spread a little thin. And maybe I can speak for myself, is when I'm pretty diligent about my on time and my off time, and I have guardrails and boundaries there, I feel like I'm absolutely more on point when I need to absolutely, you know, take the game winning shot, so to speak.

9:19Well, you know, I think Bezos talks about it, but one of my clients used to say, he goes, Jim, I make in a year four or five decisions that really matter. Yeah. I want to be on my game when I make those decisions. Here's the other problem. I'm never completely certain which ones they are until later. So I kind of have to be there with the right energy level, with the right focus. you can't be dragging your tail all the time or you're just not gonna be effective. So I completely agree with you, Josh. Wow, I really love that. Who was it that said? I think Bezos said it, yeah. Oh my gosh. I'm like literally writing that down right now because I think that that's so key.

10:03Jim, tell me about the work that you do with the CEO project and why an advisory board counselor or a peer group is so critical today. Yep. And this goes back to think and grow rich. Napoleon Hill talked about building a mastermind group around you, you know, smart people that have your interests at heart with no agenda. So this goes back to the 30s, right? The idea of doing this. And you can certainly craft your own, but there is an industry in curated CEO advisory boards or groups that we build. Now, we are specialized because we build them for larger and more sophisticated CEOs. There are a lot of people that do it down market, sort of sub$20 million and lower.

10:44Lots of options down there. That's an easier model to run. We have a harder model to run, which is a larger company, a more sophisticated CEO. But if you're in that category, we're able to build a group around you of like size, like complexity. So other$100 million CEOs are going to get your problems better than anybody else. And we've heard the story more often than you can say, of people that join a peer group, They end up being the largest person in their peer group and they go, man, I could help them, but they really didn't understand my problems because they haven't even faced them yet. They don't get it.

11:19And so they lose interest. We kind of hit them where they live. There's also a book Keith McFarland wrote, he talks about building infrastructure around yourself as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, infrastructure that maintains your energy, that keeps you going, that holds you accountable. that's what the peer group does for you. And most of these CEOs don't have effective boards. I'm not sure I've ever seen an effective board, honestly. So, you know, the highest compliment we had, we had one guy who'd had bunches of boards, because this is the best board I've ever had in my life. They actually tell me with real issues and they actually want me to be successful and they have no agenda.

11:57So that's what it does for somebody. Yeah. And so if someone says, well, gosh, that sounds great in principle or in theory. How do you facilitate that? So when we get together and we bring them off site, when we do this, we work on two things. One is a scorecard to keep you accountable because very few of us as entrepreneurs have a scorecard that keeps us accountable to increasing our performance every quarter. So everybody does that every time. And that's powerful. A lot of places don't do that. Then we dig deep in one topic, this point of constraint I talked about. That's the topic you're bringing to the group to process with you and for you, right?

12:39And we'll go an hour, hour and a half digging really deep on that topic, getting you feedback on it. Inevitably, you have five, six, seven, 10 things you can bring home Monday morning, execute like crazy on them. But what's interesting is in terms of being a project, always improving your performance, I'm going to learn from seven or eight other really smart CEOs that are performing at a high level. I go, man, I love how Josh is handling benefits. I love how Jim is managing culture and they always get ideas to bring back to their organization. Maybe they don't deal with it today. Maybe it's tomorrow, but it's as part of this constant improvement of your performance as a CEO.

13:19And I think you can't really go to school for it, right? If it was black and white, We'd look it up on the internet or look it up in a book and we'd be done. It's these 37 shades of gray decisions that we have to make as CEOs. That's where modeling of other people who are really good at it can make a profound, profound difference. And that's what a really good peer group does for you. And I think that curation of who's in your group, custom built for you, is part of the secret sauce. Wow. And so if someone goes to the CEO project and they're interested in that, what's the enrollment process like?

13:56How does it get put together? How does investment generally work? How is that run? So we interview everybody before we even think about talking to them about a peer group. We want to understand them. We want to understand their business. We want to see if they're a learner, if they have humility. and that is a really big issue because you're going to go to a group meeting and you're going to get very very direct feedback like bullseye right in the forehead like if you don't want to hear that you don't have the humility to take that on and absorb it and use it it's probably not a good answer for you and that's cool but so arrogance we don't like so learners humility performers those are the sort of dynamics we look for in the interview if that all lines up and they have time control, they can actually show up to meetings.

14:42Then we go and look for a group that would be perfect for them based on that interview. If that looks great, we begin an onboarding process of feeling each other out. They like us, we like them, we bring them to a meeting. If that all works and the meeting's great, and frankly, to some extent, the people in the group can, you know, give the thumbs up or thumbs down, right? And I've had it happen where somebody comes to a meeting to go, hey, Jim, I don't know about this individual. I think you may have made a mistake in recruiting. And we have to listen to that, right? Because one bad apple can ruin a good, good group.

15:15So that's the model. But there is sort of an onboarding and a mutual evaluation process that occurs before you end up going to a meeting. Yeah. To our friend that's listening, they're listening to a podcast and you have a podcast. It's called the Lazy CEO Podcast, of which you You can just simply search in your podcast player right now. But Jim, tell me a bit more about the podcast, who you talk with, what you talk about. Yeah, it's really designed for CEOs, although I think we have some people that would like to be CEOs that learn from us as well. I speak all by myself once in a while on a topic of interest.

15:52I think recently I did strategy deployment, which I have a little bit of expertise on. We'll bring in people that are high authority coaches that really have some interesting material. For example, I'm bringing Kim Scott, who wrote Radical Candor. She has a new book coming out onto the podcast. So we had the former CEO, Campbell Soup, on a little while ago talking about his leadership approach. So there's always gems on how to be a better CEO, how to be a better executive. And I'm pretty, I'm not going to say random, but I'm really curious. So everything's interesting to me. The other day, we had a woman who ran channel sales for Trend Micro, and she climbed Everest.

16:32So, you know, we talked about channel sales and how do you think about that and how do you decide and how do you be a good channel partner? And then we spent 30 minutes on Everest, which was super cool as well. So it's a little bit of what Jim is interested in, but I hope that's also interesting to much of the audience. Yeah. Your website is The CEO Project. Jim, when somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do? Well, search around. You're going to see our advisors. You'll see our methodology, the time commitment. You can read dozens and dozens and dozens of blogs to get a feeling for how we think about the world.

17:08And if that all looks, as well as the methodology we use in the peer groups, if that all looks interesting, there's a form there you can fill out. And then we will schedule an appointment and spend some time talking to you, as I indicated. And if it's a fit, great. And if it's not, that's okay, too. You know, it's not for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Jim Schlexer, again, you oversee business growth and performance for CEOs through powerful curated peer advisory groups. Your website, once again, theceoproject.com. Your book, Great CEOs Are Lazy. It is a very popular book. It's got many, many, many hundreds of four or five star reviews.

17:51and of course your podcast is The Lazy CEO Podcast. Jim, thank you so much for joining us. Gosh, thank you.

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