Kris Safarova’s Biography

What is the CEO’s role?

What is the CEO's role? The CEO's role is to be the top executive of of a company who is responsible for key decisions such as overall strategy, managing overall operations. Here are some key responsibilities of a CEO: The CEO's role is to determine company's business model. The CEO has to define and adjust as needed company's strategy. What is company's mission, vision and strategy. The CEO has to define standards. Standards for your people and for your product. And for us at FIRMSconsulting, for example, standards for our people extend to standards for our clients. It's about integrity and quality. And CEO's role is to ensure the company operates in line with these standards. You have to lead by example. As with children who learn not from what you say but from what you do, so are employees within the company. The CEO's role is to motivate and solve the role of a politician in negotiating and maintaining/growing relationships with suppliers, distributors, collaborators, partners, and strategic allies. The CEO's role is to be an effective communicator. You have to keep on reinforcing important messages. When you say it, they say it. The CEO's role is to ensure financial…

Competitive advantage in your career

This week we will speak about how to think about what should be your competitive advantage and comparative advantage as you are building your career or business. Developing a sustainable and realistic competitive advantage and comparative advantage in your career is challenging. Everyone reading this understands how difficult and tiresome it is to renew your profile so that you remain attractive to your organization and clients on a daily, weekly, and yearly cycle. And it is not just about being better than you were 12 months ago, it means being attractive relative to your peers and competitors. Each year thousands of MBAs and other graduates enter the workforce with fabulous credentials, and your peers get staffed onto choice assignments close to the senior leaders of the organization. And for those of us living in the Western world age is often viewed as a liability versus an asset. Discrimination based on age is still acceptable and tolerated to a large degree. We live in a crazy world where 40 year old is considered old by many people in their 20s and 30s, even though we as humans are living longer and longer. Competing earlier in your career is easier. You can get an…

Meeting My Management Team

Meeting My Management Team Leading change is an intensely lonely job. This series of articles teaches how to apply best practices from McKinsey & BCG to any consulting business. In part 1 of this series we dived into how I was head-hunted to turnaround a boutique consulting firm. Part 2 provided an overview of the consulting practice I inherited. Part 3, this article, focuses on my initial interactions with the management team of the consulting business. We explore the challenges of leading and turning around a consulting business when one has to deal with a hostile management team. For confidentiality reasons, we have modified some of the details in these articles.  Meeting my management team The night before the first meeting with management team was not a great one by any measure. The room was tiny, it was noisy and I could not sleep. There are few things worse than taking an extra strong sleeping pill and not being able to sleep, and then feeling terrible the next morning because the pill has not worked itself out of your system. So at 7am I was sleepy, groggy and preparing for a tough meeting. Everything moved in slow motion. Did I mention the airline misplaced my luggage, again? I was feeling…

Terms

Last updated June, 2024 Firmsconsulting LLC. welcomes you. We invite you to access and use our Websites. These terms of use apply to your use of all of the Websites, digital properties and services owned, hosted, licensed, leased and/or operated by Firmsconsulting L.L.C., Firmsconsulting Inc. (“Firmsconsulting,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), including Firmsconsulting.com and any other site/digital property that we have owned,  licensed, leased or operated, do own, license, lease and operate or may own, license, lease or operate in the future including social media sites (collectively, the “Websites”). Unless we say otherwise, all references to the Websites in these terms of use include all such Sites. These terms of use do not apply to your use of unaffiliated Sites to which any of the Websites may link to or direct you to. These terms apply, without any restrictions both applied or assumed, to all interaction, electronic or otherwise and through any communication medium, with Firmsconsulting. We provide visitors to our Websites (“Visitors”) access to the Websites subject to the following Terms of Use, which may be updated by us from time to time without notice to you. By browsing the public areas or by accessing and using the Websites in…