Customer Reviews

CEOFlow: Turn Your Employees Into Mini-CEOs

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I've been the CEO of a number of technology companies, and I found Aaron Ross' book "CEOFlow - Turn Your Employees into Mini-CEOs" intriguing and educational. It was intriguing because almost every CEO should aspire to achieve this type of "flow". Empower your employees to work because they like it and to take initiative (become "mini-CEOs"). Create a "pull" (collaborative) versus "push" (dogmatic) organization structure. Your job will be easier, your company will be more successful, and you'll have more free time and be less stressed. This seems like nirvana to me. Occasionally I was able to achieve it, mostly I haven't.

It was educational because Aaron talks a lot about his philosophy and backs it up with very specific examples from his experience as the manager of an inside sales team at Salesforce.com. There are also examples from two other companies that represent his business philosophy - Semco and AES. Examples of the way he applied his philosophy at Salesforce.com are very well written and instructive. One example involves engaging his entire team of about 15 people in designing and managing their compensation plan. This includes one of his core concepts - transparency - because each month, he published the compensation results to the team on a single spreadsheet. Every member of his team could see how much money his or her peers made! This served both as a motivation tool and as a "self managing" system since errors in the relatively complex tracking and measuring metrics would be flagged and corrected early in the game.

The book has a number of interesting quotes, and two of them stood out with me as representing the core messages of the book:

"Leadership: the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower.

"Employees will give to the company only as much as they feel they're getting. Want employees to go the extra mile? Start by going the extra mile for them." ~Aaron Ross

Much of the book is based upon Aaron's experiences in technology companies. He was the founder of a dot com company, LeaseExchange, and then he "put his ego aside" and joined Salesforce.com, first as a telephone sales rep, then as the creator and manger of a very successful inside sales team, and finally as a Director in their Mergers and Acquisitions Group. If you're interested in management techniques, especially if they involve sales management, this is a very good book to read.

Ken