The CEO Test

Adam Bryant interviews Greg Brenneman of CCMP Capital. Brenneman has several very good points on leadership and management. Boiled down, they are:

1. Pick the 2 or 3 most important levers that will give you the maximum impact without overload
2. Good business plan: divide a page in quadrants (Market, Financial, Product, People)
3. Be brief:

   There’s a great saying: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” I find that in business a lot people take the time to write the really long letter, but they don’t take time to write the short one, and it even applies to doing investments.
   
   When one of our guys is presenting an investment, you always kind of know they have it if they can explain it very quickly. And if it takes a really long time and you’re into the square root of the price of oil in Uzbekistan, you probably know that it’s gotten too complicated, and that’s when I start asking questions — when people start having trouble simply saying, “Here’s the idea.”



4. Be on time.


5. Start on time, end on time. Move meetings along.


6. Respond promptly: “It takes you just as long to respond quickly as it does slowly. It’s not a time management thing for you.”