Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into our July and August issue of Inside Darley.
Hopefully, you and your family are having some relaxation time this summer and maybe also taking some time to read up on different things. And our first attachment here just came out from McKinsey on what CEOs are reading this summer and there’s some great articles and videos in here. In fact, one thing that really caught my attention was that some great research on the six roles of the CEO and what separates the best CEOs from the others. This article talks about six areas.
Number one, they set direction, and they’re the best ones because they’re really bold.
Number two, they align their organization in that direction and make sure that they’ve got KPIs and OKRs in mind.
Number three, they mobilize their leaders to deliver and give them the tools that they need and the psychology and working with teams.
Number four, they embrace their board of directors and make sure they use them as chief consultants.
Number five, they over communicate with all their stakeholders, whether that’s their employees, their customers, their vendors, their other constituents.
And lastly, they work on their own personal effectiveness.
Particularly, they’re working on only those things that they can do and let others in the organization take the lead on things that maybe they’re able to do just as well or better. At Darley, we do a lot of learning here and one of the areas is listening to podcasts.
Our favorite podcast is TheLeadershipPodcast.com. And in fact, Darley’s been the exclusive sponsor of that podcast for the last several years.
And Jim Vasilopoulos, co-host of The Leadership Podcast, also ran Darley University a couple of times this past year. And in June, he ran a Darley University for all of our employees, over 100 actually participated, that talked about crucial conversations. And in fact, we’ve attached for you a section from his book called Clarity that talks about conflict. That podcast also has a really strong military following.
Along those lines, we had roughly 100 people participate in our annual defense sales conference, including over 50 sales reps who came into Chicago, most of whom are veterans. I’ll tell you, they’re just amazing folks, but they’ve lived a complete life of service and maybe haven’t really sold much in their life. We focused on that with the elevator pitch and a lot of other things. With that in mind, I’ve attached a copy of my book Sold!, which is about the art of relationship sales using authentic leadership and emotional intelligence.
We’re also heavily involved as a business with the National Defense Industry Association and on Wednesday, July 24th, we’re going to be hosting the 15th annual NDIA conference here at our headquarters in Itasca, Illinois. We’ve included some information for you attached and our keynote speaker is going to be Kelly Callahan, and she comes from DLA. She’s the first chief for their Fire and Rescue program. We’re also going to have a panel on cyber security and a number of other things, so we encourage you to come out for that. If you haven’t had a chance to check out our new e-commerce website, which is now shop.darley.com, we’d encourage you to do so.
We’ve also included a way for you to sign up as well as a little tutorial on that for our fire customers too. If you’re going to be down at the Fire Rescue International Conference down in Dallas, August 14th through the 16th, please stop by and visit us at booth 4017.
Thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
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