Qualities of a Great Chief Executive Officer

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Is being a strong leader with years of expertise enough to make you a good CEO? What other skills and qualities can you integrate into your style to help you achieve success under pressure?  The role of a CEO is a versatile one. Often, they are the face of the company to internal and external stakeholders, liaising with management, the board, and the public. They are responsible for the long-term strategy of the company and for instilling brand values in employees.  A CEO must possess certain traits to be an effective leader.  There are 7 things that a really good CEOs do:

1.   Be Likable

All good CEOs are all very likeable.  They are the kind of people you want to be friends with. One of the most important features of a good CEO is his or her ability to leave a great impression on people, being it clients, investors, partners.

2.   Sell, Sell, Sell

CEOs have a lot on their plate.  When companies are more mature, they normally have a VP Sales or a CRO and a full sales team on board to market and sell the company’s products. Still, a good CEO will never stop selling.  Actually, a good CEO is always one of the best sales reps of the company. Just think about it — A CEO always sells the vision of the company to clients, investors, partners, existing and new employees, and of course, the general public.

3.   Listen (Not Only Talk)

Salespeople tend to be preoccupied with talking, which is not good enough for CEOs. Especially CEOs need to listen, they need to listen to their employees, listen to their clients and their partners to name just a few. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?  Not so much!  No matter how smart we are, the ability to be open to other ideas, to be coach-able and to realize that wisdom can come from other people, is super important.

4.   Work Hard. Lead by Example

There is no substitution for hard work. All good CEOs work very hard. They lead by example. Startup teams are ready to work hard too, but if their leader does not lead by example, this will simply not happen.  No need to go overboard with working hard; don’t forget that eating and sleeping once a while is also important guarda ora! Still, keeping the perfect life balance is not always achievable for a good CEO.

5.   Communicate Challenges, Not Just Achievements

It’s fun and easy to discuss achievements, but communicating challenges and failures is much more difficult although that’s so important.  People around any CEO are smart enough to know that challenges and failures are an integrated part of any company, including the best ones. There is everything to gain by openly discussing those. Just keeping quiet about those things does a CEO a huge disservice, since employees will think that their CEO either does not understand the issues or that he or she does not trust them enough to share, which is never a good thing. The best CEOs start every board meeting with “stuff we failed to do during the last quarter”. That might be a typical, but the best way to start a productive board meeting.

6.   Ask for Help

When we think about leaders, we tend to think of the old western cowboy who was silent and confident, never expressing weaknesses and certainly never asking for help. In practice, it’s quite the opposite — Great CEOs are very good in relying on others and asking for help and receiving assistance. Smart CEOs always use people around them, who are willing to help if asked the right way.

7.   Humans First

The typical image of a successful business person is a cold-hearted individual, with zero emotional intelligence and no moral standards. At least for startups, this is so wrong! All good CEOs are great human beings. Yes, they are very focused on the success of their companies, but they are sensitive to others at the same time.

 

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INDOAEROSPACE 2020 EXPO & FORUM : 4-7 November, 2020

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INDOAEROSPACE 2020 EXPO & FORUM taking place from 4-7 November, 2020 at Jakarta International Expo Kemayoran, Indonesia.  The expo will be one of the biggest aerospace, airport technology, commercial aviation and aviation security event in the region.  A website link of the event is given below for companies interested to participate, please;

https://indoaerospace.com/

Vital Touchstones for Talent-Conscious Businesses

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Building an inclusive talent strategy is an essential practice for every business that wants to stay competitive. Inclusive hiring or expanding the pool of people who are recruited, screened, and hired into your roles provides employers with a broader pool of talent to work with. It increases workforce diversity, and proven driver of business productivity.

But building an inclusive workforce is not so simple. Like any business problem, success hinges on a company collecting and analysing performance data to drive improvement. But for an employer that is just starting to think about measuring the inclusivity of their hiring practices, they should focus on three essential things.

  1. Who is in your pipeline?

This is not a statistic so much as an overview of your hiring funnel, but you can’t understand if your pipeline is leaking without first knowing who is entering it and where are they leaving. With this data, companies can build a picture of what their current pipeline looks like and who progresses from one step of the funnel to the next. Companies can use this data to set a baseline for where they are now, and set performance targets grounded in evidence.  Race, gender, age, education level, and veteran status are all common data that many companies use to assess their pipeline composition.

 

  1. Measure the conversion rate at the resume screen.

The first round of pipeline conversion from the job application to the resume review is often the trickiest for non-traditional candidates to move through. By their nature, resumes capture a narrow slice of what a candidate can offer, focusing solely on work experience and education. It is much harder for a resume to effectively communicate whether someone possesses the underlying skills needed for the job, or the attitude the applicant brings to their work every day. Employers should look at who is screened out at this early stage to ensure they aren’t losing out on great talent that looks a bit different from their typical candidates.

  1. Study your offer to acceptance data.

This stage of the hiring process offers critical insights into whether you are able to not just attract candidates to your open jobs, but get them to accept your offer. In today’s tight labour market, applicants have more options than ever. But for companies that are focused on inclusive hiring, looking at offers made and offers accepted also provides great insight into how attractive your company and positions are to a diverse set of candidates. If you are doing a great job of getting people to apply for the roles, but as they interact more with the company they leave your pipeline, then it’s clear work needs to be done to plug those leaks.

Pipeline composition, first-round advancement, and offer-to-acceptance are just a few of the yardsticks companies track to understand how effectively they are building and leveraging diverse candidate pools. By measuring these three fundamental data points, employers will quickly be on their way to capturing the business value that comes from developing a more inclusive talent pipeline.

 

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Start-ups Take to the Sky

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The Aircraft Industry is Rife with Opportunities for Start-ups

In recent years, the aviation and space industries have become extremely attractive to start-ups and small businesses. The boom of start-ups in the aerospace industry began in 2010 with new initiatives from Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Bertrand Piccard (Solar Impulse) – all of them are successful entrepreneurs.

With a gleam in their eyes, they started to argue that smaller companies can take to the skies on par with huge corporations.  And they were right: today, the aircraft industry is rife with opportunities for start-ups. New players not only offer innovative solutions, but can also radically change the nature of the entire market. Now, the industry is flooded with new players. According to recent research conducted by NewSpace Global, the number of start-ups in the industry has grown almost tenfold since 2013 – from 120 to over 1,000 today. In tandem, in 2018 alone, £25.6 billion was invested in aerospace start-ups, according to the British venture fund Seraphim capital.

However, the aerospace industry has not evolved in the past 25 years. This tightly regulated and safety critical industry has been risk-adverse when it comes to adopting new technology. Arguably, this is leaving the door wide open for start-ups. Unlike the state-owned companies or large international corporations, start-ups use their “no fear of failure” approach. They strive to reduce the final cost of their products and services to make them accessible to a wide range of customers. To do this, they have to work faster, generate more new ideas and use a number of cross-sectoral, technologies and solutions. For example, it took SpaceX five years and £307 million of investments in order to develop the carrier rocket Falcon 9, while NASA would have spent about £1bn for a similar task, according to the agency’s own calculations.

Over the past few decades, the quality of technologies and various components has improved while their manufacturing costs have dropped. As a result, start-ups are now present in almost every segment of the aerospace industry. The fastest growing trends in the industry are unmanned aerial vehicles, satellites, space communication systems, various services for maintaining space and aviation infrastructure, and finally, suborbital tourism.

For example, Chinese start-ups Space Transportation and Linkspace have recently launched their reusable rockets – an affordable alternative to Falcon 9. In the UK, OneWeb is already launching miniature satellites into the low Earth orbit.  By 2021, the company intends to use it to provide high-speed Internet access throughout the world. Orbex, is preparing the commercial release of its Prime rocket, which is specifically designed to launch ultralight satellites.
By 2023, it should put into orbit the nanosatellites of Swiss start-up Astrocast, which plans to deploy a global support network for the Internet of things. Elsewhere, the Canadian company LEO will launch a service that monitors the chemical composition of the earth’s surface and track space debris by 2021.

Agility within Start-ups

The list of start-ups doing innovative work within the industry could go on. Each example highlights that start-ups are moving from just talking about projects to action them, and at a rapid pace. Start-ups are not afraid to experiment, and as a result, new types of transport, new markets, and new categories of consumers are born right in front of our eyes.

Currently, Dassault Systèmes is working with AeroMobil, who are creating a prototype of a roadable aircraft, the first vehicle of its kind due to be released in 2020.  It will be possible to move around in any terrain and in any weather. As they say in the company itself, developing such a project required a multitude of cross-sectoral interaction.  After all, in order to successfully pass certification, such a flight-and-ground apparatus should meet the requirements of regulators of both industries at once.  But the emergence of this type of transportation will give impetus to the development of new related types of business – schools for drivers/pilots and even flight-car service.

So, how do start-ups manage to compete on equal terms with big companies?  They have the same engineering and marketing tools as market leaders. In fact, they use all the benefits of cloud computing, computer vision, Big Data, as well as business intelligence and digital IT platforms.

Furthermore, start-ups win in terms of flexibility and mobility, the use of agile principles in product development, and the ability to find and occupy new niches in the market. This gives them a great advantage over large companies.

What’s next?

Of course, market leaders won’t be quick to give up their positions to new players. They also want to take advantage of the innovations start-ups are launching. To achieve that, they are creating infrastructure to grow such companies in-house; they acquire the teams and technologies from the market and set up corporate venture funds and partnerships to support their projects. Tighter collaboration between large and emerging players will bring more innovation to the market and help it transform further.

Although start-ups embrace new ideas and technology, they often face a much bigger threat than large players: they cannot afford to fail in this highly regulated industry. They need to pass long and complex certification processes before launching their product despite being both cash-strapped and time-constrained.

Online, cloud-based virtualisation platforms offer new ways for ideation, design, manufacturing, testing, certification and operation, helping start-ups optimise their processes and keep their activity focused on their products. These platforms automate routine operations, reducing time spent on administrative tasks and freeing up space for strategic sharing of information.  As a result, start-ups can accelerate their programmes and be the first to bring their prototypes to market.  Investments in digitalisation can pay off in as little as 6-18 months, fast-tracking the start-up’s journey to profit.  Providing these young companies with the resources to centralise all their operations helps start-ups focus on what they do best: coming up with creative ideas to complex issues and challenging the big players.  This creates a much more vibrant industry that pushes the boundaries of the atmosphere.

 

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Launch Startup Skyrora Successfully Tests 3D-printed Rocket Engines Powered by Plastic Waste

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Rocket launch startup Skyrora, an Edinburgh-based company that’s developing a new launch vehicle for small satellites, has successfully tested its new rocket engines in their first stationary ground-firings, a huge step on the way toward developing their launch vehicle. Skyrora’s rocket engines are novel not only in their use of 3D printing, but also because the fuel that powers them is developed from plastic waste — a new type of fuel called “Ecosene” the startup says makes its launch vehicles greener and more ecologically sound than the competition.

The rocket engine that Skyrora is testing will eventually power the final stage of its 22-meter (72-foot) Skyrora XL launch vehicle (closer to Rocket Lab’s  Electron at 57 feet than SpaceX’s  Falcon 9 at 229 feet), which will be capable of delivering multiple payloads to separate orbits ranging up to 500 km (310 miles) above Earth, a popular low-Earth orbit target range for small satellite payloads.  Skyrora fired the engines both with its Ecosene fuel, which is its kerosene directed from waste plastics using a proprietary process, and with traditional kerosene RP-1 rocket fuel, giving the company the opportunity to compare the two fuel sources in terms of performance.

Skyrora says it can create around 600 kg (1,300 lbs) of kerosene form 1,000 kg (2,200 lbs) of plastic waste, and its fuel results in around 45% less greenhouse gas emissions. The Ecosene also has the advantage of not requiring cryogenic freezing, and it can be stored in tanks for long periods of time, something that the startup says helps it work particularly well for launch conditions from the Scottish spaceport from which the company plans to launch.

Ultimately, this is just one test on the path to validation and eventual launch, but Skyrora is encouraged by the results of this test, and it plans to fly its first Skyrora XL vehicles from its U.K.-based launch site starting in 2022.

 

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