The CEO Project Podcast

A discussion about the history of wine in Napa, between Jim Schleckser, CEO of The CEO Project and host of The Lazy CEO Podcast, and Mark Gudgel, author and wine expert. Jim: For those of you that know me, and maybe some of you do, some of you don't, but I have an alter ego, and my alter ego is my involvement in wine. Several years ago, I decided to get kind of into wine beyond the drinking part,...

Today we're going to talk about stock. As you know that there is common stock and preferred stock, but we are going to dig deep into preferred stock because it is a less understood instrument. It's particularly important for entrepreneurs because this is an investment vehicle used by private equity firms. So if you are ever considering either a partial sale, maybe bring in some cash or cash for gr...

We've got another phenomenal guest today, Ian Altman. As a business growth expert and bestselling author, Ian is recognized as one of the top 30 global gurus on sales. And his same side selling academy is ranked in the top five globally for sales development programs. Everybody's running a business, and when I talk about the secrets of a great business, a great margin is one of them. Ian has ident...

Jim Schlecker, CEO of The CEO Project and host of The Lazy CEO Podcast has a conversation with Dr. David Burkus.  David: I help leaders and teams do their best work ever. I think two things fundamentally. One is that work is central to our lives. Even if we had universal basic income and everybody was being paid, most people would still want to do something and make some contribution to the world....

Today we have an amazing human being and an incredible leader. We have Kim (KC) she'll tell you what that means. Later Kim, who's a retired Air Force colonel, served in the Air Force for more than 24 years as a fighter pilot and a senior military leader, she's flown more than a hundred combat missions protecting troops on the ground both in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As a senior military leader, K...

Organizational capacity is the capability of the people in your business to get stuff done. In this episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast, Jim, Schleckser, host and CEO of The CEO Project, talk about Organizational Capacity. Basically, if you have a pile of work, size of X, you have X capability to get that work done. The raw capacity to execute and the capability to execute are really two things. We wi...

In this episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast, Jim Schleckser, host and CEO of The CEO Project, interviews Karin Hurt, CEO of Let's Grow Leaders about innovation and conflict in the workplace. Jim Schleckser: Welcome Karin, share with us a little bit about your work with Verizon as well as what you do now with Let's Grow Leaders. Karin Hurt: I learned so many things from Verizon and, in Courageous Cultu...

Jim Schleckser, CEO of The CEO Project and host of The Lazy CEO Podcast, sits down with a fun guest, a hall-of-fame speaker who has had multiple bestselling books, Jay Bearer.   Jim Schleckser: What are the five things that we need to be smart about in engaging with marketing to ask the right questions as CEOs? Jay Baer: I think partially because it's obviously the fastest growing and all around u...

Welcome to Andrew Davis, a super creative guy, he came out of media, spent time with the Muppets had a digital marketing agency that he sold. And now what he does is he is primarily a speaker, so he gets in front of audiences, inspires them and educates them, and entertains them. He's spoken to our CEO group before and a couple of our clients as well. Andrew Davis: My focus today is helping people...

This episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast is about creating advocacy. We have Heather Hansen, who is the CEO of Advocate to Win, and she is going to talk to us about advocating our positions and persuading people. Heather shares her background as a lawyer and how that has led to her expertise in persuasion and expertise. Heather defended doctors in medical malpractice cases. One of the things that made...

This episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast is about determining when it is time, as a Founder, to bring in an outside CEO to run the company. We have a gentleman named Nick Wilkinson. Nick was a CEO that was brought into a company called Binary Tree that one of our members Steven Pivnik had founded, and he was trying to position for sale and upgrade the talent. Nick was the guy he identified and ended u...

This episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast is about both performance reviews and employee feedback. There is tension around performance reviews, did I achieve my goals? They have a lot of stress around them. People don't like to do them for that reason, both sides. We will talk about both performance reviews and feedback as the yin and yang of engagement with employees. If you think about feedback as a...

The Lazy CEO Podcast guest on this episode is Stephen Drum. Stephen is a 27-year, Navy Seal retired combat vet and he now speaks on leadership, some of the lessons that they learned and developed through his many years of leading people through dangerous, high-stress, mission-critical, environments, which we can all learn a lot from as we run our business. Here is a little bit of the conversation...

In this Episode Today we're going to talk about some specific ways that you can become more purposeful in your organization. Let's just start with the audiences that care about this. Everybody does at some level, but there are three specific audiences that are highly attuned to purpose. Gen Zs - they have no fear about going to get another job because they've grown up in an environment where jobs...

A conversation between Jim Schleckser and Dave Warren Jim: Today we going to talk about several important business topics for CEOs with a long-term member of The CEO project and a friend of mine, Dave Warren. Dave is a serial entrepreneur. He started and owned, a couple of different businesses, but he's kind of a student of business. Dave really appreciates business as much as I do. Tell us a litt...

At The CEO Project we work with CEOs of a variety of sizes on their most difficult issues, but today we are focused on one that everyone is concerned about - building a predictable growth engine into your business. The first thing to think about is a grid that was developed by Bain Consulting. Customers are on one axis and products on the other new, new, and old for each one. Existing product, exi...

In this Episode… Jim Schlecker and Sam Watson, discuss the complexity of the multinational business and managing multiple presidents. Sam shares his story. Sam's headquarters is here in the US but is spread around about 40 different countries. They have meaningful, 50 plus headcount in probably 10 or so countries around the world. Their geographic spread both in terms of customers as well as manuf...

We all know the math that the cost to retain a client is 20% of the cost to acquire a client. From a sales and marketing point of view, if you can retain the clients that you bring on board, you're way ahead of the game because you don't want to have to go out and spend literally five times as much money to go acquire new ones. It is one thing to get them, but you need to keep them. Keeping them i...

Today we are speaking with a renowned thinker about engagement and management and strategy and how you bring your whole team along on the journey in an engaging way. What is Reassessment? People are reassessing where they want to be, what they want to do, who they want to do it for, and who they want to do it with. People want to work, but they don't want to work where they feel they have to put u...

Box out, and make room for the strategic moves needed to stay profitable in an inflationary environment. Today we're going to talk about dealing with unpredictable markets and specifically inflationary markets. Specifically, we are going to talk about two options, do nothing, or do something, and then what can you do. If you do nothing about this environment, you are assuming it's transitory, it's...

Jim Schleckser, The CEO Project, and Kim Conklin, KC Consulting, debate the merits of compensation and incentive plans. Listen to this Podcast for entertaining bantering between Jim and Kim as they navigate this extremely important and relevant topic – fair compensation. What does Fair Compensation mean? It means when employees look internally, other people that do more or less the job I do are pa...

Today Jim Schleckser talks on a topic that we see a lot when we're dealing with CEOs – accountability. What is accountability? The word is literally the definition of what accountability is, which is an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or account for one's actions. In other words, transparently accept and explain what I've been doing and the outcome I got. When somebody says, I s...

We have talked before about the criticality of management, as we talk about business model processes and leadership or talent, everybody's happy to spend on their executive team and get these A players. Everybody's happy to go hire people that are sort of billable, and customer-facing, but once you cross about a hundred people, the distance between those two spreads enough that you must have peopl...

Neen James helps people think about how they focus their time, and how they maximize the impact, for not only themselves but also their organization. And she does a lot of very interesting coaching around systems thinking and communication techniques to improve executive effectiveness. Neen shares insights about paying attention, and how to focus your attention on the things that are your strength...

This episode focuses on the secret to being a great and lazy CEO - knowing what to work on, only working on that, and getting rid of everything else. When I spread my effort across the whole organization, or we call it peanut buttering, your time across the business, it's not particularly useful because you haven't applied force in a significant way to one or two problems to really bust through th...