CEO Perspectives

The first week of Spring semester became the "classes hunting". As there are so many good classes offering here, how could you choose one over another? you go to attend(sort of like shop around). This is a quite new experience for me, to hunt and bid for classes.

So far, I am quite happy that I got in the Wednesday class -- Corporations at the Crossroads: The CEO Perspective. This is such a demanding class, 120 students got in and 81 more on the waiting list. Here is the list of speakers:

Feb 3 Jim Sinegal President & CEO, Costco
Feb 10 Dan Mudd CEO, Fortress Investment Group
Feb 17 Strauss Zelnick Founder and Partner, Zelnick Media
Feb 24 Jeff Immelt Chairman and CEO, GE
March 3 Ray Elliott CEO, Boston Scientific
March 10 Nigel Travis CEO, Dunkin’ Brands
March 31 Dan Hesse CEO, Sprint Nextel
April 7 Wyc Grousbeck Managing Partner & Governor, Boston Celtics
April 14 Jeff Zucker CEO, NBC Universal
April 21* Jim McNerney Chairman and CEO, Boeing
April 28 Bill Ford Chairman, Ford Motor Company
May 5 Mark Templeton CEO, Citrix
May 12 Leo Apotheker CEO, SAP

There will be pre-required reading and 3 executive memos. To have them face to face with you discuss their decisions, esp. during critical times. When we look back history, we could objectively say which is right/wrong decision. But for them, how did they make those decisions at that time, what information they depend on or choose to analyze?

To give you a crazy picture of what Wednesday night class looked like, I came way early with my dinner in hand to secure my seat. Before Mr. Sinegal presents, the room was so full, totally break the fire drill policy, each stair was squeezed 2-3 persons.

Costco, the company built in Washington. I am one of Costco customers, always wondering why they only keep the limited choices, but periodically have some surprise products. Mr. Sinegal presents the history, growth plan domestically and globally. He promotes Costco through his every slides and words, but he does not advertise Costco since he believes the word of mouth and fact of long line of Costco gas station advertise well without paying. During Q&A time, being a Washington LCB employee, how could I miss the opportunity to ask him about Costco lawsuits, which my team has provide a lot of data for AG on those cases. After I describes the lawsuits and background info, he asked me if I ever dealt with Government or work for Government. He is such a brilliant person, still believe that the second case will be like the first one, won over Government.

1. Reward shareholders by doing 4 things: obey the law, take care of our customers, take care of our employees(huge admiration to him on providing good healthcare plan for employees despite what wall street says), respect suppliers
2. think like a small company
3. succession plan: promote people inside, who knows business well
4. merchandising: senior management should understand merchandising, and have right people skills, the rest of knowledge and skills can be trained later
5. carry everything to save money for customer
6. never have an exit strategy
7. constantly figure out how to keep price low
8. good luck & good people (go back to price club relationship)
9. self-service got good satisfaction
10. never keep old generation products(let 45% TV stock sell for only 4% value, in order to clear the stock)
11. no advertise
12. supplier can not determine the price. (this is critical in order to run the low price)
13. do not put corp. money to political party
14. believe every employee should have health care
15. Japan, Korea & Taiwan take 1/3 Costco sales
16. learn tricks how to use existing data(only 20% make sense, this is a hard decision for managers)