In business environment, one company can’t do everything by itself. It needs help. That’s the reason Business-to-Business(B2B) exists. So businesses are looking for expert companies that excel in a certain area of their needs.

If you are a software provider, people are expected twice as much from you. First, you are an expert programmer. Second, you are an expert of what your software do. Let’s say your software is providing Human Resource Management System(HRMS), you can’t just rely on your strength as programmers alone. You have to be an expert in HRMS too. The reason is simple, if your customers are paying for HRMS, they are looking to depend on you for their HRMS needs. This is even more important if you are providing software as a service (SaaS) as you need a single solution for every customer. That means,  your solution has to be best, a trend setter, industry standard, to manage human resource.

That’s not only it. Since your platform is web based, your websites must be user friendly, secured, fast-loading, easy to use(high usability) and comply with WC3 standards. Those are  area of expertise and you need to be among the best of each one.

That being said, building a software is not about putting all the functions together. It is about meeting your customers expectations. If you don’t know what your customers expected, ask them. Make some surveys, let them fill in all the blanks in your mind. If you don’t talk to your customers, you will be a blind in a desert. Instead, be the expert in every field that you are in.

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But One thing that you shouldn’t do is to be the gear. As a CEO, your job is to make sure your organization work efficiently, and work the way you want. To do this, you don’t have to be an expert for every field. What you need is the right person for every position. That person will be advising you the best practice for his/her department. If you are the one who is advising them, then it’s a last generation organization. As the next generation organization, CEO will be the one who listen and decide, not the one who advice and do. There is one easy way to know which one is you: If you are the one who talk a lot in a meeting and your employees are listening and taking note, this organization is obsolete. If you are the one who listen to the suggestions, your employees are fighting for their own ideas and at the end of the day you make the well-informed decisions, then you are on the right track.

In our world today, there is too much knowledge to know. It’s impossible to know everything. If all of your employees depends on you for inputs, the total value of your organization is only you. This is a waste of time and money.

Some say that doing this will let your company lose the steer. Yes they are right if that is the only thing that CEOs do. However, this is not the case. Like driving a car, CEO will be the one who is steering and watch the dashboard for engine condition and problems. You are the one who hold the steering but not necessarily know about every moving part in the engine. But in this analogy, your car also self-revolutionize into a better and faster car.

My last words, stop being a car mechanic and start being the driver.

It’s not just that the campaign misrepresented Kenyans but it also shows that the world can be culturized if you have enough money to dump in. So, next time you hear your friend Brrr-ing in front of you, explain to him that he just falls victim to a worldwide commercial culturization.

1. Personal insight.
Great CEOs are great leaders. They know themselves and what they stand for. They have been called on all their lives as problem solvers because others know them to be fair and impartial. People respect their opinions and look to them for guidance. Great CEOs are mature as people. They can suffer disappointment more gracefully than others and give others credit for their achievements. They don’t come in the office door yelling for something they need. They aren’t as concerned about titles or power structures as they are about the welfare of those who work at the company. They are trustworthy because they’ve always been honest with people and have earned that trust. They care about families, and they know that people are more important than dollars and express it in their actions every day. Finally, great CEOs seek out feedback. They want to know how others see them so that they can understand themselves better and continue to grow as people. They also want feedback about the company from an employee perspective, and they use surveys as a starting point for creating a dialogue to make things better.

2. Resourcefulness.
Great CEOs seem to have boundless energy. They come to work with the greatest enthusiasm. Even when they don’t feel like it, they find ways to reenergize themselves and come in ready to go. They take good care of themselves physically and emotionally so that they can be there for the employees and the needs of the company. They give much more than they take every day. They don’t give up. If the wall is too high, they back down and find another way around. They don’t blame, but they do look for solutions to problems so that those problems are less likely to happen again.

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In Software-as-a-service(SaaS) business, your advantages are also your disadvantages. We always hear about instant deployment, pay as you go, no contract, no initial cost and no server required. All of those seems good to customers but for software developers, it means one thing, the customers can leave as fast as they came.

One solution to this problem is to make the customers fall in love with your application. You can do this by designing your application for your users. In developers world, it’s called – usability.

There are hundreds of books on this topic. Tutorials and tips are everywhere. If you want to just read a single post about usability for your lifetime, read this:

Five More Principles Of Effective Web Design

From an 80-year old principle of AIDA to modern eye heat display, Smashing Magazine explores the way to make the web a more pleasant place to work and play. (heh, surprising good rhyme)

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