Leading From The Front

It was good to hear a new CEO say he spends half his time seeing customers.

Last week Sandeep Vij, the ex-Xilinx guy who became CEO of MIPS last January, told me: “I’m spending a lot of time seeing customers. About 50% of my time is on customer visits. In 35 days I’ve been on 23 flights seeing customers.”

Who does that remind you of? Well Sir Robin Saxby for one, who used to joke his office was at 30,000 feet because he was spending so much of the time flying to potential customers to win the early ARM licenses.

When Fairchild was set up, one of the first things Bob Noyce did was to pop over to IBM and get an order. (Helped, no doubt, by the fact that Sherman Fairchild’s Dad was an IBM co-founder).

Customers like meeting their suppliers’ CEOs. It makes them feel loved and wanted. It gives them the impression they can screw a special deal.

But so often, these days, you’ll meet a newly appointed CEO who rambles on about his grand strategy, or his even grander vision or, what’s immeasurably worse, his cost-reduction programme, and you start to get the impression he’s not going to make it.

When a new CEO talks about his customer visits, you think maybe this is a guy who can do it.

And that’s the impression I got from Vij

“The best leaders lead from the front”, he told me, “and I’m in front listening to the customers.”


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