The Khorus Blog

"Khorus helps me determine at a glance whether every part of the organization is functioning optimally in support of the overall mission."  

—Scott Sherwood, CEO, Packet Design

At Khorus, our mission is to make our customers the best-run companies on earth.

Today we’re excited to share the story of one of those customers: Scott Sherwood, CEO of Packet Design, a network performance management software company.

When Scott stepped into the CEO role, he had a globally dispersed team and a new vision, strategy, and goals to implement. Early into his tenure as chief executive, Scott put Khorus to work.

Download the case study and watch our interview with Scott to see exactly how the system helps him:

• align teams and people to the new strategy.
• use Khorus as a “canary in the coal mine”—a way to spot developing problems before they escalate.
• increase motivation, engagement, and communication across the company.

Want to see more of Khorus, and how it helps CEOs run their businesses? Get in touch today for a demo!

Yes, micromanagers are a problem—but vilifying them for decades has led to a harmful trend, especially in the C-suite.

Right on. That’s really all I have to say about Pat Lencioni’s latest post on the Table Group blog, “Micromanagement Is Underrated.”

That title makes a controversial statement—who wants to risk getting slapped with the epithet micromanager, still dreaded long since it was coined in the 1970s? But Lencioni argues that fear of that label (“the organizational equivalent of being labeled a Neanderthal”) has caused many of today’s managers to flee from one problem only to run smack into another: what he calls “abdication management.”

Over 75 years ago, Chester Barnard published a landmark book called The Functions of the Executive, one of the first on organizational theory. In it, he makes a key observation: “Successful cooperation in or by formal organizations is the abnormal, not the normal, condition."

In other words, organizations don’t cooperate naturally. That’s why one of the fundamental roles of the CEO is to proactively build the basis of successful cooperation: organizational alignment.

In this post, I want to dig into what alignment really means—specifically, the three forms it takes in every organization. When CEOs set up systems to achieve and maintain all three, they have laid the groundwork for a cohesive, well aligned, and high-performing company.

Fail at this task, and you’ll be like a conductor at the front of an orchestra that’s trying to simultaneously play seven different Beethoven symphonies. It’s not a pleasant experience for anyone, and makes for a chaotic organization that is easily trounced by the competition.

We’re excited to announce some big news at Khorus: we’ve just finished raising $4 million in an investment round led by our founder and CEO, Joel Trammell, and angel investor Tom Greig.

This brings our funding up to $6 million, which will allow us to take the power of Khorus to more and more CEOs and companies. 

Since we launched last February, we’ve seen our vision—to make our customers the best-run companies on earth—begin to come to fruition, hearing from customers about how the platform is improving alignment, engagement, and predictability within organizations. (And we of course use Khorus at Khorus, to keep our own team focused and collaborating effectively.)

To wield influence over people and teams, CEOs must master what I call the 3 Cs: credibility, competence, and caring. No matter your industry or leadership style, these are the essential components of executive excellence. This week: the final C: caring (and how it can actually help improve your company’s financial performance).

The idea of being caring makes some CEOs uncomfortable. It’s a little touchy-feely, isn’t it?

Think of it this way: in the CEO context, caring doesn’t mean caretaking or mothering your employees. Caring means showing that you actually give a damn about them and about the business, and that you consistently do what’s right for everyone, not just yourself.

Along with credibility, caring is how you demonstrate your character as a CEO, and a newly released study backs up the idea that the chief executive’s character is positively correlated to company performance. Leadership consultancy KRW International polled 84 US companies on whether their CEO and top management displayed four components of character (integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion). From the April issue of Harvard Business Review:

The researchers found that CEOs whose employees gave them high marks for character had an average return on assets of 9.35% over a two-year period. That’s nearly five times as much as what those with low character ratings had; their ROA averaged only 1.93%.