What Keeps CEOs Up at Night

March 14, 2014 Leave a comment

Mar 11, 2014

What Keeps CEOs Up at Night

NOREENA HERTZ: What  are the top five issues that every CEO faces these days?

1. Technology is proving to be the game changer in industry after industry. CEOs need, to quote Wayne Gretsky, “to see where the puck is going and get there first.”

2. Super-transparency increasingly defines the business environment. In a world in which there is no “off the record” companies need to be truer faster and CEOs need to think beyond their legal counsel’s advice when they get things wrong.

3. Products or services that just do the job increasingly won’t suffice—consumers are increasingly voting with their wallets on social and environmental issues as well. CEOs need to interrogate their supply chain and think about how to differentiate their offerings along these lines.

4. When it comes to the economy we are not out of the woods by any means yet. Despite the increasingly positive rhetoric to the contrary CEOs should remain at this time cautious and think very carefully about how a range of potential scenarios–from a second European dip to a rise of public protests–might affect their strategy and planning.

5. From a personal leadership perspective most CEOs today admit, in private at least, feeling overwhelmed by their own to do lists. Email overload is a widespread problem, stress levels are reaching new heights, the “urgent” crowds out the “important”. If you are a CEO ask yourself—What can you delegate? What can you ditch? Who can better serve as your Gatekeeper? How can you make sure you carve out essential thinking time?

Noreena Hertz (@NoreenaHertz) is based at the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making at University College London. She is the author of the recently published “Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World.”

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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