Unfortunately, too many if not most/all young company CEO’s say they can afford neither the time or the money for a group like this………….which is penny-wise-pound-foolish in my view.

I Chair 2 CEO groups up here in the Sacramento area……….and I continue to Chair the Sacramento Angels.

I really appreciate reading your stuff! I write a bi-monthly column for the Sacramento Business Journal re the broader topics of angel investing and entrepreneurism, but I can’t hold a candle to you!

Best regards,

Lonnie Martin

Many businesses are so hung up on hierarchy that the C-level people do not want to hear feedback from anyone below their level. That attitude then spills over into each lower level of management. The problem with that approach is that you don’t always get the true story by listening only to managers at your own level. I worked at a company where one of the factors in its loss of market leadership was that a fire was raging in a particular department that was critical to customer retention but the COO who had oversight kept telling the CEO that everything was OK.

Re: the recession of 2008, so many people at the line level saw it coming, but the people they reported to weren’t listening — in fact, they were demanding increased sales projections when they should have been facing reality and looking for operating efficiencies. As a result, many companies, in fact entire industries, crashed and burned, and tens / hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in the process. We were affected firsthand — my wife worked in sales administration for a major media company that was then acquired at fire-sale prices by a private equity firm that immediately began the dismantling process and getting rid of its most valuable employees because they were the ones making the most money. I’m sure many other readers have lived through or know of similar horror stories.