Greetings and welcome to Session 4 of creating a technology startup company. In this session, we're going to talk about management and operations planning. The management strategy for the type of core competencies that we need to bring in to develop our products and services, and also the operations, processes or mechanisms or structure, what is needed in order to implement our strategy. Let's go ahead and jump in. Well, for an overview of this session really the various things we'll be covering include the founder's team, what are the key roles and responsibilities of the founders? Before we go into too much detail, understanding a concept of authentic leadership and how this may support our management strategy in building our founder's team, and also in recruiting our board of directors and our core management staff. As we learn to bring authentic leadership and authentic practices into the workplace, it invites the individuals and participants to bring their whole sense of person, and we'll talk more about what that means as we go forward. We're also going to emphasize some of the key practices of effective leadership and in particular, emotional intelligence, and all of this coming together to help us be able to construct our management and operations strategy and plan. Beginning working with the data that we've been collecting as we have looked at the product and looked at the market. Now we're going to look at what does it take to actually deliver on those things and we're going to develop an initial understanding of the outline of the plan. Now, we've hinted at that before, but we're going to get a little bit more granular this time. Let's go ahead and jump in for this first session where we'll talk about the key roles and responsibilities of the founder's team. First off, right at the top, it's important to recognize that titles are good and they do serve a purpose, but it's really more about roles and responsibilities, and that's where we want to bring our focus. Who has the best core competency, the best specific skills and knowledge to address the key aspects of operations and of development and building our business and then allowing that to take care of itself. Now, having said that, it's still we want to have a general understanding of the framework in relation to how we would build a company. But initially just try not to get to hung up on the names, and recognize it in these early stages, everyone, especially when your core group and that may be you, you may be the only person. Meaning you wear many hats. You have a lot of different roles and responsibilities or your core group does, and you may find that you tag team on things that you collectively decide on things until you can really get clear on the focus of how you're going to direct specific roles and responsibilities for each individual. Until then, striving to remain agile and adaptive and just think in terms of what do we need to do to get this done and to get the company moving forward, and to try to hold this whole company perspective in focus with regard to the outcomes that you're actually moving toward. In order to make that happen, interpersonal communication among the team members is so important, and especially bringing forward aspects of emotional intelligence. We're going to spend a little bit of time talking about that in this session as well. But essentially, emotional intelligence is developing the capacity to empathize with others. Not just to lay out instruction or to give a strategy, but actually engage with one's understanding of the information exchange and invite the participant to share their experience so that we have a clear understanding that our message has been delivered and that the most effective understanding in our communication has been reached in order to move forward. That's what we're striving for. In that context, creating a safe and supporting environment where feedback is welcomed and feedback is recognized as a learning opportunity. To bring experience and observation into the process and make adjustments as may be needed so that we can continuously move toward creating the value that we're promising our customers. We want to seek out and strive to recruit and retain complimentary core competencies. This is something we'll mention a couple of different times so as we go forward, because it's so easy to end up with duplicating skills and that's what we'd like to avoid unless there's an immediate need scaling for example but taking care that are extent as much as possible, that our core competencies are complimentary so that as we bring them together, we're building something even greater from our management team from the perspective of the management team. Having said what we did about the titles, roles, and responsibilities and really focusing on what needs to be done. Now, it is also important to have a framework or an understanding of how we might build a company out as we begin to actually implement strategy in the business plan and how we designate roles and responsibilities. Let's go through some of the key positions and again you may serve where all of these hats or you may have two of them. If there's only a couple of you on the team, for example one or more may not be relevant initially. One that is always relevant is the Chief Executive Officer, and this is the individual that's responsible for orchestrating everything that is happening. From that. Think of him truly like a conductor in front of the orchestra and they're guiding and leading, and they're striving to maintain harmony and flow. I'm not a music person, so missing the parts of the metaphor here, but the point being that they are the leader and striving to interact with all the different component parts of the orchestra and in the similar way, the CEO is responsible for articulating strategy and leading strategy by example and he or she also the outward facing entity if you are individual or representation of the company, so from the world outside looking in, the CEO may be representative of the character for example and so we want to recognize just understand that this outward focus means the position is very strategic and requires a broad and diverse knowledge and skill set. What is specific to our industry or to our technology? At the same time, having enough diversity so that there's management capability to interact with marketing and to interact with technology and interact with operations and recognizing that in the early stages, you may do lots of things, including what we call the Chief Operating Officer and this is a more inward focused position where really looking at day-to-day operations. How does a business function on a practical level? What actions and procedures and processes are in place, and how things are actually getting done. The skill sets are general knowledge and skills, if you will. But the focus is on the implementation of the strategy. CEO and Chief Operating Officer worked very closely together and thinking of the CEO is the lead and in formulating and ultimately articulating strategy both internally and externally. The Chief Operating Officer is mostly looking inside and about execution or implementation of the business plan. Someone has to look over the money. Whether you call them a Chief Financial Officer or they're an accounting level support, initially, it's important that someone is very focused on watching the checkbook or watching the digital balance now to bring it into the current times. But the point being that someone from an expert level of knowledge and skills are really taking care to manage the flow of funds. They are able to recognize what is needed, what is accessible, and what will need to be sought out if funds need to be raised, for example, all of these things. What are your expenses and tracking these things? What are the obligations and being mindful that there's adequate cash flow to implement the business plan as it progresses? Then there's this position that broad in scope, we might call the Chief Technology Officer. These individuals is an expert level of knowledge and skills and very focused on developing that aspect of the core competency in the company that may actually lead to intellectual property and creating value on a level that when integrated with products and services, provide an enhanced level of competitive advantage. This is an important part, especially in a technology company and having expertise around the core competency that the company's products and services are focused on is essential to being able to bring in other expert-level support staff and individuals from developing the products and services utilizing these core technologies. Then last of all for this initial overview, the Chief Marketing Officer. Now, this is an individual who is able to look into the market space, conduct research, gather that data and extract useful meaningful information from that data, and use it to influence the design of the products and services that are being offered to address the value proposition that is being presented to potential and target customers. This is an important role. A very important role. Requires expert knowledge and skills, it's very strategic, It's both inward and outward-focused, so being able to understand the customer, and understand their pain points, their needs, translate that into a product definition, working very closely with the Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operating Officer, to communicate the market requirements and demand into technology products and services. Very important role. CEO, COO, CFO, CTO, CMO, lots of O's. All of them are different titles, different levels of responsibility. But again, as we mentioned earlier, take care not to get too hung up on titles at this point. You may find you wear different titles at different times. It's what is required, what needs to be done. In the very beginning, stay focused on what needs to be done and what the outcome is. As time goes and it becomes more apparent and necessary, then consider how the titles and roles may fit with individuals in the company and in the founders' team. Well that brings us to the end of Video 1 of 7 for Session 4. I'll see you in a while for Video 2.
