“Be not simply good; be good for something.” Thoreau
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Kelly Herrell
I want to welcome Kelly Herrell, our first guest blogger. Kelly is the CEO of Vyatta, “a venture-funded company disrupting the networking industry” and is also a long-time member of ExpertCEO. You can read his blog at http://kellyherrell.wordpress.com/
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When’s the last time you were in a product review meeting and fought a yawn? Incrementalism is like walking – a moderately good exercise that never actually gets your heart rate up like, say, kicking sand in a bully’s face.
News Flash: Our job as CEOs is to create and grow value. And value creation can go stratospheric if you successfully create and then own a new, relevant category. Milk it if ya got it, but what if you don’t?
Disrupt. Change the rules. Lay a course to claim an unaddressed space… or make a conscious decision to give an extant industry an atomic wedgie in a way that makes you, the wedger, very new and relevant. Defined right and evangelized effectively, the industry will grant you entrance to capitalism’s Valhalla: “Market Leader.” First rung on the Ladder of Perception. Cool as the other side of the pillow.
But if the change you’re introducing is that disruptive, how does the CEO’s role change during that time? I subscribe to the “You break it, you own it” theory. That is, the greater the disruption you decide to deliver, the more it must be publicly championed from the top. There are scads of reasons for this, but in general it’s because disruptions create cognitive dissonance. And the bigger the disruption, the more dissonance to be overcome – from outside as well as from inside.
That’s why the CEO needs to become the Category Evangelizing Officer. Don’t delegate it; you’re the one with control of the company’s resources. Your stakeholders need to hear from you directly – your investors, the market, your team. Repeatedly.
Evangelizing’s not a short-term gig, either. You don’t pencil it into your calendar for Thursdays at 10:30am. It’s a very public full-court press, a “venue-seek-and-destroy” mission. Know the beliefs you’re trying to change, by audience type. Work through the thermoclines of opinion influencers. Crack the bone of denial so Marketing can get at the marrow of dissonance and feed on it.
Evangelizing takes time. It’s a judo flip on super-slow-mo. But in the end the old concept is on its back, embarrassed at the position it’s found itself in. And for a big disruption, it’s your job to own it all the way to the end. As Chi Chi said, “Ninety-five percent of the shots that don’t actually get to the hole won’t go in.”
And whatever you do, talk to your peers; this is why a venue like ExpertCEO is so valuable. Many have already trod the path you’re considering. The dialogue inside is beginning…If you’re a current member of ExpertCEO, click here. If not, go to www.expertceo.com to join.
