It took me a long time in my career to figure out what Owain Lewis shares below to make better decisions by doing what’s best for “the business”, in part because I didn’t know what mattered. I focused on what looked like the right thing from my limited perspective early in my career, and had no clue what was keeping my company leaders up at night. Admittedly, that was partly because those leaders were not communicating their concerns.
For those unclear on what’s best for the company, a couple simple guidelines:
— Create more value for customers. You don’t have a business unless you are solving a problem that people will pay you to solve.
— Focus on what’s most important. The goal is not to do everything. Even with effectively infinite resources at Google, we didn’t get to do everything we wanted. So the question is: how can you use the resources you have available most effectively?
Unsurprisingly in our capitalist culture, those two points boil down to increase revenue and cut costs. For a business to be viable, it needs to make more money than it spends, so help your leaders do that. One of the professors in my Columbia master’s for Technology Management program said “If you want to understand how executives think, you have to understand the money.”
That insight changed my career, as it was ringing in my head when I saw the revenue analyst position at Google. I thought “If I’m analyzing and forecasting the revenue, I’ll learn to really understand the money!” which turned out to be true. That role led to me working with many top executives at Google, which helped me become the Chief of Staff for the Search Ads team, and then convert my learnings from working with those leaders into my executive coaching business.