Advice for CEOs

Entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic by nature. As a new year begins there is ample ground for many entrepreneurs to feel good. The latest signs of an improving economy were strong enough to help persuade the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates recently--for the first time in nearly a decade. A boom in valuation of technology-based companies, private as well as public, is driving expansive optimism in that sector.

One of the most valuable assets that everyone has access to is the mistakes you have made—if you can honestly assess the lessons they can teach you and apply them the next time you face a comparable situation. This principle is particularly true for CEOs, whose mistakes can hurt the future of their company, their employees and customers and even their communities.

The beginning of summer is a time when business leaders like you, whose daily lives involve juggling priorities and crises, might consider taking time to step back to refresh your perspective on the challenges your company faces. One way to shake up your approach is to commit to a program of reading. There are thousands of business books that claim to provide you advice. To help you get started, here are seven books that can give you new insights on where to take your company.

Reed Kingston of InsightSPI, a performance software company, recently posted a blog article on an important new development for middle market companies: tools for analytics. He says that Business Intelligence (BI), and even “big data” are becoming available for firms with limited IT budgets.

One of the first management processes that many emerging growth companies try to institutionalize is budgeting. Budgeting is an essential building block of good management. It serves to control spending in line with a company’s operating and capital plans. It provides a framework to compare actual revenue, expense, and profit with the plan. Budgeting forces accommodation and agreement between top-down management goals and bottom-up feedback from managers and staff about what is actually feasible for the company to achieve. And lastly, it imparts a sense of discipline and order to the company’s operations.

A familiar saying asserts that "it’s lonely at the top." If asked to relate this adage to business leaders, most people might think first of CEO's of Fortune 500-type companies. These executives sit atop far-flung operations and large, remote organizations, with hundreds or even thousands of employees they never meet face-to-face. They face intense pressure to maintain quarterly earnings growth and unstinting public and press scrutiny.