Brownian motion is what causes heat: particles colliding randomly with other particles like billiard balls on a snooker table. The faster they collide, the hotter the particles become.
It’s the metaphor that comes to mind when I think about the impact that a CEO has on their business.
The more energy a CEO has for something, the more activated their people and their business will be, simply put.
The ‘watch-out’, given the grind that the CEO position can become if you let it, is that your ‘particles’ can slow down as the life-blood gets sucked out of you over time (and particularly during the current Covid era) .
It’s entirely natural, given all that the CEO has to hold, but it also doesn’t have to be that way.
The beauty about CEO energy is that it is subject agnostic: it doesn’t matter what you get excited about, as long as you are excited about something. In fact, the more particular (and even eccentric) it is to your personality, the more natural and authentic it is.
- For some CEOs, it’s about exercise, sport and fitness.
- For other CEOs it’s about learning and self-improvement.
- Some CEOs care about community-mindedness and outreach.
This fits into the Character elements of the Character/Skill/Knowledge troika that I use when describing the three levers that a CEO has at their disposal when working on their CEOship. Part of being an evolved human being is finding things that matter to you and pursuing them with zest.
As human beings, my view is that we’re naturally wired to feel excited and energised and the journey for all of us is to find an outlet for this most natural of kinetic energies.
Every business needs to feel unique so as to avoid the grayness that can at times subsume businesses and this is the CEO’s trump card in this regard: something that you care about in an entirely natural, high-energy way that flows into every corner of your business, lighting people up, getting them moving and creating particles of high energy and heat.
