What is CFSO (Chief FS Officer)?

The CEO is the chief of all executives. That's the US organizations, have proven, that they need CEO to ensure the shareholders’ interests. All the sudden, shareholders want to guarantee their profit, we have COO (Chief of Operating Office), CAO (Chief Administrative Officer), CFO (Chief of Finance Officer. What if the organization has another Financial Controller? Can they both incorporate into their work?), CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), CIO (Chief Information Officer), CSO (Chief Security Officer), CTO (Chief of Technical Office) and etc officers in a big corporation. Those designations are just perfect for a corporation. However, can you believe that, nowadays, there is a CFSO, Chief Feng Shui Officer? This CFSO is more important than the CEO because CFSO can help not only, the business to grow, but also to enhance the performance of all chief officers. A Chief Feng Shui Officer can manage multitasks simultaneously and this officer’s forecasting is more accurate than any analysis from whatever expert’s analysis. There will be no more risk management because there is no risk in any business, if we have a CFSO. Just one CFSO, we can get rid of many ‘redundant job’. I’m not being sarcastic or irony literally. However, it’s true that there are people doing it and things have happened.

Best Paid CEOs

No. 1 - Richard D Fairbank (Capital One Financial) USD 249.42 Million
No. 2 - Terry S Semel (Yahoo) USD 230.55 Million
No. 3 - Henry R Silverman (Cendant) USD 139.96 Million
No. 4 - Bruce Karatz (KB Home) USD 135.53 Million
No. 5 - Richard S Fuld Jr (Lehman Bros Holdings) USD 122.67 Million
No. 6 - Ray R Irani (Occidental Petroleum) USD 80.73 Million
No. 7 - Lawrence J Ellison (Oracle) USD 75.33 Million
No. 8 - John W Thompson (Symantec) USD 71.84 Million
No. 9 - Edwin M Crawford (Caremark Rx) USD 69.66 Million
No.10 - Angelo R Mozilo (Countrywide Financial) USD 68.95 Million

The winners for the brainiest businesses and businesspeople of the year

Smartest CEO: Robert Iger
Smartest Turnaround: Motorola
Smartest Technology: RSS
Smartest New Product: Boeing 787
Smartest Exit Strategy: SKYPE
Smartest Ad Campaign: GODADDY.com
Smartest Entrepreneur: Jeremy Allaire

Carlos Ghosn - Turnaround Specialist?

Carlos Ghosn, the Nissan and Renault CEO, is the first person ever to run two big corporations on Fortune top 500 global companies. The owner of GM – General Motors, Financier Kirk Kerlorian reserves high hopes on Ghosn actions. FYI, the current GM is in 10.6 Billion of losses, although it’s the 5th world largest corporations. Kerkorian is hoping to get Ghosn as CEO of General Motors, and force Rick Wagoner, GM's current CEO, out through the merger, as he believes that Ghosn is what GM needs to return to profit.

Ghosn has made the first historical turnaround in 1999 for Nissan. When he joined the company, it had a $20 billion debt and only three of its 48 models were making any profit. One year after he arrived, Nissan profited 2.7 billion dollars and had an operating margin of 10.6%. For seven years, Ghosn has maintain both Nissan and Renault successfully growing and and delivering profit and value. Apparently the system is stable and the alliance is win-win.

Ghosn wants to take the challenge to fix GM’s problems. With this, he needs to find benefits to both Renault and Nissan by doing so. He launches a few strategies to get GM back on track. Firstly, kill some brands and focus on attractive new ones. Secondly, take fuel into consideration. Invest into alternate-fuel engines. Thirdly, look for exclusive synergy. Use cross functional team work. Collaborate with eachother. Lower down waste and double work, improve productivity. Subsequently, “Keep Score”. Ghosn believes that the two-party alliance can perform so well through the years, so can be done, the situation where, three parties will have the same impact and benefits to each other.

Worst CEO of the Year

Herb Greenberg (who specializes in funny smells coming from heavily promoted companies) named Take-Two's Paul Eibeler as the "winner" of the Worst CEO of the Year award.
Eibeler is the latest in a revolving door of CEOs at the video game maker, having taken the post in January for what amounts to a second tour of duty in the company's executive suite. He left in April of 2003 for "medical leave," only to resurface three months later as president of Acclaim North America -- a job he held for just three months. He rejoined Take-Two in April 2004 as president, before his elevation to CEO. (Acclaim, meanwhile, filed for bankruptcy liquidation in August 2004.) Eibeler's climb to the top coincided with founder and ex-Chairman Ryan Brandt's topple by regulators to a non-executive position in the wake of accounting issues. As of fiscal 2005's proxy, filed last May, Brandt was still the company's highest-paid executive; he now runs one of the company's high profile divisions, which itself has not done tremendously well. (But, don't worry, he's not an executive.)Eibeler, for his part, has done such a poor job getting his arms around the company that Take-Two has missed its own earnings guidance for multiple quarters. So far this year it has sliced earnings guidance by more than 60% to a range of 53 cents to 56 cents a share, after the company's hot-selling game, Grand Theft Auto, was given the dreaded "adult' rating by the video software industry's rating group. The company has since suffered a series of setbacks on the rollouts of newer games -- a perennial problem at Take-Two that appears to be getting worse. Take-Two has been quite a story, at least in terms of stock price. It was under $4 a share in 1998 and peaked at over $29 earlier this year. Now, though, it's in the $19 range, and they're definitely leaking fuel. They also own one of the best sports game developers in the world (Visual Concepts), and if they implode, it will be a disaster for sports gamers.

Why CEOs Fail?

Despite the continuing controversy surrounding today's corporate executives, leadership (CEO/Chairman) still shapes a company's destiny. Fortune magazine stated that 70% of the time CEOs fail to manage the organization because they can not execute their strategy. And, CEOs fail to execute their strategy because employees are not aligned with the organization strategy. Secondly, the strategy is not changing with the environment. Thirdly, the CEO has been a successful leader and promoted to the top spot (become a complacent leader). Or, the CEO has been recruited by another company.

CEOs need to expose to numerous techniques in helping the organization achieve its goals. However, which or what techniques and when should be applied? Most organizations will use multiple techniques simultaneously (such as: Activity Based / Change / Performance / Process & Value Based Management; SixSigma; Customer Loyalty; Outsourcing; Value Added Services and etc.). But when is the right time to execute on the right techniques?

We can understand business organizations, the failure can be avoided if the CEO and the employees understand and conform to the structure of the organization. The Board of directors of a modern corporation is a more primitive and different structure from the previous organization and CEOs must use different techniques to work with the boards and the companies. In the absence of knowledge, people do the things that have worked for them in the past, and when they fail to work, simply do the same things more intensively.

But new CEOs have planned everything and desperately want to be successful. When they arrive in a new organization, they are receptive to guidance they believe may keep them from failing.

Many reasons lead to the success and failure. We will find out in this blog.