Virtual High School Global Consortium (VHS) is a membership fee-based educational nonprofit which partners with schools to expand their course offerings. Founded in 1996, VHS is a collaborative of over 600 schools in 31 states and 42 countries. In 2011/2012, VHS had nearly 18,000 course registrations in over 250 middle and high school VHS courses, including Advanced Placement, core, elective, and credit-recovery courses.

VHS is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Secondary Schools and Northwest Accreditation Commission, and has won numerous awards for course quality and teacher professional development. Virtual High School is the education industry’s leader in providing high-quality online courses to high school students and in preparing classroom teachers to be effective online teachers. VHS is committed to offering schools the highest quality courses at the lowest possible price, and to its goals of high instructional standards, responsiveness to member schools, and affordability. Its greatest strength is its global, cooperative school membership, which offers students and teachers alike the opportunity to participate in a worldwide community of learners.      

Why VHS?

When educators and parents are looking for innovation and demonstrated achievement they turn to Virtual High School (VHS). VHS has proven in its fifteen-year history that its collaborative is committed to quality course design, online education standards and pedagogy, student assessment, teacher professional development, and teacher certification. VHS and its member schools work together to build valuable solutions, including: professional development training, challenging, student-centered courses and engaging enrichment programs that address critical educational needs.

As the majority of educators agree, good education continues to be about the relationship between teachers and students, and VHS constantly dedicates efforts to improve that relationship. VHS students, time after time, share that they feel more comfortable expressing themselves in online VHS class discussions where disability, social status, racial and even gender differences are not as evident as they would be in a traditional classroom.

VHS teachers often express that their VHS online professional development training helps improve communication and enhance learning opportunities for students in both their online and face-to-face teaching experiences.  VHS schools embrace the opportunity to join VHS to augment professional development training options for their teachers and to instantly expand their array of core, elective and AP courses for students.

The Position

Reporting to a non-profit Board of Directors, and based in the Boston metro-area, the CEO will be responsible for driving growth of the organization through a combination of operational excellence, market vision, superior product development, sales execution, and customer service.

This is a true entrepreneurial challenge and not for someone who does best in a big company environment. It takes a CEO who knows how to gather market information, analyze it, evaluate existing core assets, manage an infrastructure capable of scaling, and bring to market a set of new online courses and other offerings that address the needs of school districts. In other words, it takes a superior product manager who also knows how to run an efficient company. Intelligence and a nimble, searching mind are critical.

First-Year Goals

•  Achieve or exceed key financial and quality targets.

•  Drive growth in VHS membership and professional development products and services.

•  Develop and achieve VHS annual and strategic goals.

•  Oversee development and implementation of VHS educational, technical, financial, school services, sales, marketing and financial plans and activities.

•  Focus team, including curriculum and instruction, technology, sales and marketing resources on key funding opportunities and market needs including adjustments required by a dynamic and changing environment.

•  Strive for continuous improvements across all functional areas including periodic evaluation of structure and staffing to improve performance and adjust to changing conditions.

•  Build development plans for key staff, providing for professional growth.

•  Provide staff with performance reviews on annual and as-needed basis.

•  Oversee management of budget and financial systems for VHS based upon strategic and annual goals.

•  Represent VHS at local, state, regional and national conferences.

Core leadership responsibilities

•  Work collaboratively with the Board and members of the senior executive team to establish the strategic plan for the overall business.

•  Develop and implement the annual operating plan for the business consistent with the strategic plan of the overall business.

•  Review market conditions, establishing and prioritizing key market development activities, reviewing the effectiveness of sales efforts and channels to market, providing sales forecasts and pricing policies consistent with profitability performance, and establishing sales and marketing plans to achieve annual sales goals.

•  Ensure product plans are executed to meet growth targets as well as ensure the ongoing competitive positioning of the business.

•  Improve operational efficiency and effectiveness by assessing, upgrading or installing new operational systems, processes and methodologies.

•  Review activity reports and financial data to determine progress and status in attaining objectives and revise tactics in accordance with current conditions.

•  Execute and achieve annual growth targets while gaining increased leverage on costs and operating expenses.

•  Demonstrate leadership skills in rapidly growing both product and service sales essential to high fidelity implementations and continuing support of existing customers.

•  Champion succession planning and employee development, ensuring bench strength for future growth while maintaining a focus on furthering the existing organizational culture.

•  Demonstrate skills in recruiting and holding top talent.

•  Assert her/himself into the existing leadership group and earn the respect of the leadership team and Board.

•  Demonstrate the capacity to serve customers while building a great place for VHS employees to work.

The Career Opportunity

For an experienced senior executive with the requisite background, this position offers the following career benefits–

•  Opportunity to “do well by doing good.”

•  Opportunity to drive growth in a financially solid but still vibrant organization—to take revenues from <$10MM to $50MM and more…and to be compensated accordingly

•  Opportunity to develop best in class product offerings and with significant bonus incentives

•  Opportunity to work with a strong, committed Board that is willing to invest in future growth

•  Opportunity to live and work in the attractive Greater Boston area (NW suburbs, including Concord)

The Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate currently is working as a CEO, President, or GM for a rapidly growing organization that creates and markets online courses to high schools. Alternatively, this individual is a senior executive for a K-12 virtual school or the online division of a school district, charter school, private school, or other EMO.

Specifically, the CEO will possess—

•  Significant experience and success managing an educational product or service company, ideally one focused on the virtual school or online K-12 course market

•  Strong record of performance taking a company or division from <$10M to $50M or more as operating manager with full P&L responsibility

•  Knowledge and understanding of the virtual high school or related markets, with specific experience in the delivery of online courses and an understanding of curriculum development and online instruction, including learner support

•  Strong grasp of education and educational technology as well as market and academic research principles

•  Outstanding general management and leadership skills developed in a fast-paced, dynamic, multi-tasking environment; an entrepreneurial spirit–whether within a small or large company; not a “big company mentality”

•  A self-starter mentality with sound judgment, discernment, and the ability to problem solve

•  The ability to work in a highly interactive team environment; excellent interpersonal and communication skills; flexibility a must

•  Computer proficiency with a working knowledge of one or more learning management systems (LMS)

•  Experience developing and evaluating budgets

•  Breadth if not depth in functional areas such as operations, finance, product development (IT), product management, and business development

•  Experience developing and implementing a strategic commercial business plan

•  Teacher professional development experience and/or high school teaching or administrative experience a plus

•  MBA or equivalent experience

•  Willingness to live in or commute weekly to suburban Boston.

Culturally and temperamentally, the ideal candidate is a team player who believes that individual success flows from the overall success of the organization. This involves a range of personal attributes– flexibility and adaptability; a strong work ethic; leadership with minimal Board supervision; an ability to analyze and evaluate one’s own (and other’s) performance and to develop plans to improve performance; excellent presentation skills; willingness to take responsibility for both success and failure—a thick skin; self-confidence and a positive attitude about self, company, and marketplace; effective listening and questioning; sincerity, trust, believability and warmth; strong closing skills; and a strong desire for success.

As executive recruiters, we often get asked about executive compensation.

So often—after we finish up a search—we aggregate the compensation data we’ve collected across the search, and share it back with the innovation community. In this case, we recently finished a VP Engineering search for an early-stage Internet client located here in the Northeast in May, 2012.  Note that there was a specialization required in this search requiring the VP Engineering to have prior experience with Ruby on Rails development environment.

Here is the snapshot of compensation highlights from our search—

The footnote at the bottom of the image above articulates the following criteria for the majority of companies in this data set:

• Internet content/e-commerce providers

• Primarily B2C (business-to-consumer) focused

• This compensation data was specifically from those who had at minimum software development team responsibility that included all architecture, development, user interface & QA

• Although a number of these companies had venture capital/external funding, several were bootstrapped but still with engineering teams of more than 10.

• Companies were located in in the Northeast, with highest concentration in Massachusetts & New Hampshire (New England)

There are many variables to consider that influence where to pinpoint one’s own compensation vis-a-vis the above:

• The more urban locations, the more likely compensation will be higher

• The later the stage of company development, the lower the incentive compensation, the earlier the higher. Yes, this is counter-intuitive, but usually the larger the company, the more mature and capped the incentive compensation plans become

• Equity is represented here as a percentage of total outstandng stock options or share grants a company has issued or available. The more mature/de-risked a company, and the more recently an executive has joined, the lower the typical options grant.

Conservation Services Group (www.csgrp.com) is the oldest and largest energy efficiency services company in the US, focused on the residential home market. The company engages in the design, development, and delivery of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. It offers various services, such as appliance recycling, commercial building performance, renewable energy, clean energy market development and generator representation, solar electric power design/installation and service, and other residential energy efficiency services.

Based in Westboro, Massachusetts, CSG was founded in 1984 by current CEO Stephen Cowell and 4 others to change the way utilities perceived of and operated their power generation facilties on behalf of rate payers across the country.

Today, CSG is in 22 states with 6 regional divisions, and has grown from the original five founders to more than 800 employees and $100M in revenues.  Given the initial pioneering economics of CSG’s value proposition, it was founded as a not-for-profit, and remains one today.  However, the entrepreneurial spirit runs deep, and CSG has benefited from this, growing particularly rapidly in the last 5 years.

With clients across the country like NStar, National Grid, Con Edison, Alliant Energy, Nicor Gas, San Diego Gas & Electric, and NYSEG/RG&E, Conservation Services Group has firmly established itself as the market leader in residential efficiency services.

Reporting directly to CSG President Tina Bennett, the Executive Vice President of Software & Technology will play a senior leadership role as part of the senior executive committee, overseeing all software development and technology infrastructure across the enterprise, holding leadership responsibility for a team of 70+ technologists building and maintaining internal and external software, data, and systems that interconnect CSG, their residential field auditing teams, the utilities and their rate-paying residential customers.  

The Position

The EVP Software & Technology’s role is to oversee day to day activities of the software product development and enterprise architecture integration teams for all CSG’s Software offerings. The EVP will directly supervise a team of software developers, quality assurance, and business analysts; identify risk and opportunity areas; and coordinate all software development activities.

This role will also work closely with Product Strategy on the business side and manage the Lead Technical Architect to envision and define features in the product roadmap and be accountable for the features development, deployment and support.  In addition to the technical leadership of the team, this role has full management responsibility and oversight for a cross-functional group of engineering and quality assurance personnel.

Reporting directly to President, the CSG EVP Software & Technology shall:

• Manage software architecture, design, development, procurement, and integration. Also manage tier-2 and higher support once software has been placed into operations.

• Achieve cost, schedule, technical and quality performance for delivered software. Compile, maintain, schedule, resource, execute prioritized lists of development projects, including planning and managing the budget and scheduling personnel and vendor contracts to meet project needs. Collect metrics on development performance and report on them.

• Collaborate with other functional managers (customer facing business units, systems engineering, QA, and operations) to ensure architectural integrity, effective integration and test, and ongoing system stability.

• Direct technical subcontractor management including contract negotiation, technical support, budgetary management and program management of various contracts and associated budgets. Coordinate vendor contracts, deliveries and schedule with affected company parties. Contract with vendors for services to support engineering while addressing Intellectual Property, Non-Disclosures and Statements of Work.

• Manage short- and long-term staff planning, recruitment, performance management, work assignments, training, mentoring, career development, and recognition or disciplinary action.

• Be responsible for business planning and proposals, operating budgets and financial terms / conditions of contracts for both internal and external customers.

• Manage platform integration opportunities between the various CSG software products, including migration to unified code base and establishment of configurability approach vs. customization

The successful candidate must also have the ability and experience to lead a multi-disciplined organization in a multi-location environment.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years overall software development experience, with no less than 5 years in a combination of client-server & SaaS environments as well as at least 5 years of management experience.

• 2-3 years of senior-level or leadership experience in a software environment with 7 or more direct reports.

• Experience working with product managers and other business stakeholders to set timelines, budget resources, and manage expectations and quality of the development process

• Advanced understanding of SaaS web application programming architectures, including standards for security, scalability and configurability

• Expertise and experience in implementing and overseeing measures for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery

• Deep understanding of load balancing and performance optimization principals for high volume/transaction web applications

• Strong skills in .NET or similar software development framework.

• Experience with refactoring and eliminating legacy dependencies

• Demonstrated substantial leadership in both technical and management areas

• Experience leading development efforts using a variety of different SDLC approaches (waterfall, agile, etc.)

• Knowledge of multi-threaded programming

• Outstanding collaboration skills, excellent communication skills, an ability to look at the big picture

Essential Job Functions/Responsibilities

• Lead software and front-end engineers in the specification, design and development and support of all our applications, including websites/products, our core services and our internal and external tools

• Provide hands-on technical management leadership and support to software development team of 25 engineers, architects and QA team

• Identify skill and performance gaps in current organization and provide improvement plans

• Improve existing processes and establish new processes for efficient development and high quality output

• Evaluate and enhance overall development environment, release practices and Quality Assurance methodology

• In state and maintain development standards, code reviews, unit testing and integration testing frameworks

• Maintain overall ownership / accountability for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery

• Work in tandem with technical architect and development team to identify and implement new measures for system performance optimization under high load

• Lead, recruit, develop and supervise the development team members

• Evaluate and take accountability for decisions on key technologies adopted

• Ensure proper development of technical specifications and documentation.

• Estimate resource usage and timelines for development team

• Review team members’ detailed design of components/modules/code

• Provide a good balance of experience and skills in several front-end and/or back-end technologies

• Strong relational database skills, preferably SQL and Oracle

• Knowledge of latest SOA web technologies and ability to build a service layer over the top of existing software stacks

• Ability to translate technology choices into business implications

• Knowledge of cloud-based storage solutions for part or all of CSG’s current and future data needs

Skills & Personal Characteristics

• Defined by others as smart, capable, hands-on, energetic, and someone who possess a strong entrepreneurial spirit

• A proven communicator both within the technology function, but as importantly cross-functionally throughout the organization, throughout the country, and up and down the organizational hierarchy.

• A strong, assertive personality, able to make a creative contribution and build buy-in for ideas, as well as integrating with the ideas of others.

Measuring & Delivering Energy Savings

Our client  is a leading energy software company founded in 2007. Based in Boston, MA and privately held, The Company has developed patent-pending technology that enables them to retrieve utility data on behalf of virtually any household in America. Utilizing that technology, the company is the richest residential energy efficiency platform available today, and serves both customers and a variety of institutions that care about energy efficiency with its platform and the technology that underlies it. Its platform helps people to understand their energy use and be incentivized to save, as well as enables individuals to interact with and track their electric, gas, and water usage online.

The Position

The CTO/VP Engineering’s role is to oversee day to day activities of the software product development team for all of Company offerings. The role will build out and directly supervise a team of architects, software developers, quality assurance, and business analysts; identify risk and opportunity areas; and coordinate all software development activities.

This role will also work closely with Product Strategy and manage the Lead Technical Architect to envision and define features in the product roadmap and be accountable for the features development, deployment and support.  In addition to the technical leadership of the team, this role will have full management responsibility and oversight for a cross-functional group of engineering and quality assurance personnel.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the VP Engineering shall:

The successful candidate must also have the ability and experience to lead a multi-disciplined organization in a multi-location environment.

Qualifications

Essential Job Functions/Responsibilities

Ideal Candidate Profile

The diagram below illustrates the intersection of competencies critical in the position:

]]> http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/ctovp-software-engineering-for-vc-funded-cleantech-start-up-changing-consumer-behavior/feed/ 0 http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/vp-client-services-engagement-management-for-online-consumer-community-changing-the-face-of-healthcare/ http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/vp-client-services-engagement-management-for-online-consumer-community-changing-the-face-of-healthcare/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:48:25 +0000 Clark Waterfall http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/?p=2084

This executive search is for a private equity-backed, revenue-generating, 7-year-old high-growth company that represents the next generation in healthcare innovation—PatientsLikeMe brings together patients in e-communities who create insights on their diseases and treatments by sharing information that improve their conditions.  At the same time, these insights bring value to large pharma and biotech companies, influencing the way they develop and deploy drugs.  With more than 100,000 registered consumer patients, PatientsLikeMe re-balances the healthcare system, ultimately returning power to the patient.

BSG Team Ventures is  retained to identify the VP of Client Services.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the Vice President of Client Services will play a senior leadership role within the management team, overseeing all client project scoping, management and delivery.

MORE COMPANY DETAIL:

The roots of the company are anchored in one of three brothers who developed ALS, a neuromuscular disease that ultimately proves fatal.  Ben and Jamie wanted to do all they could to help their brother Stephen, and—leveraging their prior career experience and entrepreneurial leanings—decided to try to help their brother gain insights from other patients with ALS in order to improve the understanding of how the disease progresses and what might be done to ease and improve one’s condition.  And so was born PatientsLikeMe, a health data-sharing platform.  The Heywood family’s fight to save Stephen has been chronicled in the book His Brother’s Keeper as well as the documentary “So Much So Fast.”  For more, preview an interesting short video piece on their story athttp://www.patientslikeme.com/about.

THE ROLE

This position will be responsible for the overall success of all commercial client engagements including those with pharma, payers, providers, and other related healthcare NGOs.

In addition, as the key liaison between PatientsLikeMe and the business customer,  the VP of Client Services will be responsible for driving key account relationship development, deepening the understanding of the customer’s needs with an eye to expanding PatientsLikeMe’s strategic role in providing data and analytics to further the customer’s knowledge of patients, conditions, outcomes, and insights.

Below is a bubble diagram outlining  key career & functional attributes critical to success for this role:

Specific responsibilities:

Qualifications & Experience

Skills & Personal Characteristics

]]> http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/vp-client-services-engagement-management-for-online-consumer-community-changing-the-face-of-healthcare/feed/ 0 http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/vp-product-for-online-consumer-community-changing-the-face-of-healthcare/ http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/vp-product-for-online-consumer-community-changing-the-face-of-healthcare/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:33:33 +0000 Clark Waterfall http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/?p=2054

This executive search is for a private equity-backed, revenue-generating, 7-year-old high-growth company that represents the next generation in healthcare innovation—PatientsLikeMe brings together patients in e-communities who create insights on their diseases and treatments by sharing information that improve their conditions.  At the same time, these insights bring value to large pharma and biotech companies, influencing the way they develop and deploy drugs.  With more than 100,000 registered consumer patients, PatientsLikeMe re-balances the healthcare system, ultimately returning power to the patient.

BSG Team Ventures is  retained to identify the VP of Product, an expert in e-community consumer acquisition, engagement, and retention.  With current pharma customers like Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi-Aventis, the Company’s goal is to grow to 2+ million registered users in the next several years.   This role will lead consumer online acquisition, experience & engagement, serving as the internal voice of the consumer.

MORE COMPANY DETAIL:

The roots of the company are anchored in one of three brothers who developed ALS, a neuromuscular disease that ultimately proves fatal.  Ben and Jamie wanted to do all they could to help their brother Stephen, and—leveraging their prior career experience and entrepreneurial leanings—decided to try to help their brother gain insights from other patients with ALS in order to improve the understanding of how the disease progresses and what might be done to ease and improve one’s condition.  And so was born PatientsLikeMe, a health data-sharing platform.  The Heywood family’s fight to save Stephen has been chronicled in the book His Brother’s Keeper as well as the documentary “So Much So Fast.”  For more, preview an interesting short video piece on their story at http://www.patientslikeme.com/about.

The Role

As VP Product, this consumer web expert needs to have the following 4 experiences as builder-leader:

Companies that might be part of this executive’s career progress (although less likely their most current position) include horizontal social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), online affinity groups (Eons, Weightwatchers, sports fan communities like FanIQ, etc.), social commerce properties (BuyWithMe, Gilt, Groupon), or social gaming destination sites (Gamesville, Worldwinner, Zynga).

Below is a bubble diagram outlining  key career & functional attributes critical to success for this role:

[This is part 1 of a 3 part series on the evolution of leadership theory—the history, most recent thinking on the topic, and what to look for when trying to identify it, including a look at charisma, executive presence and their contributing roles to successful leadership]

___________________________________________________________

As retained executive search consultants, we are constantly interviewing and assessing executive talent for our clients.  After interviewing these candidates, our clients often reference key characteristics they found (or didn’t) in an executive that are not found in their resumes—charisma, executive presence, or other purported leadership behaviors that are generally thought to be important to success.

But clients continue to ask questions about these traits that sit in the invisible spectrum.  Is charisma an essential ingredient to leadership? If so, for all sizes and types of companies?  Are there other types of leadership where charisma isn’t present and are they successful and in what types of circumstances? What about management versus leadership?  How do we define the differences, and when is a manager better suited than a leader?  And what’s up with “executive presence”? Is that just another term for leadership, or is it different? How? Are these differences important?

All great questions.   And—although we won’t be able to answer them all here in appropriate depth and breadth—we’re going to try to lift the curtain a bit.

With the book and now movie, “Moneyball,” the question of what to look for and what to measure in picking leaders for organizations should be rethought.  In “Moneyball,” the fulcrum of the book is based on a different way of measuring the potential and future performance of pro baseball players.  In the book, the Oakland A’s general manager turned upside down what had been considered the gold standard for sports talent assessment by baseball scouts in favor of a much less obvious and intuitive set of statistics.   Pro baseball would never be the same.

So, adapting this concept, it’s worth reviewing some popular (mis)perceptions of what makes a leader.

First principles—What does an organization need: Leaders or Managers?

Leaders/leadership by its own definition indicates the following situational characteristics—

Where one is now is not where one should be.  Rather

1) One should “follow” someone or something to another place, in theory a “better place”

2) This “better place” is both NOT self-evident (convincing is required), AND

3) It requires effort to get there, and is not frictionless, calorie-free, or zero-cost.

Managers, on the other hand, are most often those who create efficient operating systems once the “better place” has been reached.

Charisma as an essential ingredient to successful leadership—True or False?

The world “charisma” comes from the Greek word for “gift.”  Charisma is better thought of as a skill that enhances leadership effectiveness by dint of a superior ability to influence others to change their initial positions, perspectives, or opinions.

I was first offered a deeper insight into the concept of charisma in leadership by the teachings of Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School.  Dr. Khurana has done extensive research and writing on the topic, from articles in Harvard Business Review (“Curse of the Superstar CEO”, HBR 2002, http://hbr.org/2002/09/the-curse-of-the-superstar-ceo/ar/1) to complete books on the topic (Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs http://www.amazon.com/Searching-Corporate-Savior-Irrational-Charismatic/dp/0691074372).  More popular business authors like Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, wrote about “Level 5 Leadership” and addressed charisma in relation to this “top leadership level.”  Collins has been quoted as saying, “Being charismatic and wrong is a bad combination,” and “I’d go so far as to say that [The Level 5 leaders Collins chronicled in the good-to-great success case studies in his book] were uncharismatic for the most part.”  (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/0066620996/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_0_0)

Regardless of good or bad use of charisma, there is still a great deal of additional research and writing on the topic.  Clearly we associate the effects of charisma with enhanced motivation, inspiration and intellectual stimulation it engenders in the listener.  But can it be taught?  One branch of research surrounds this argument.   If you read the works of Professor Robert House at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, he deconstructs “how” charisma works.  From House’s work, one could infer that charismatic behavior may be both “born in,” but also taught with enough study and practice (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/674.pdf).

The Dangers of Charisma

What are the pitfalls of charisma in the corporate context?

• Charismatic executives tend to suppress individual thinking and leadership development in subordinate teams.  Leaders with charisma can create a culture of “followers,” rather than young, budding leaders and the next generation of a company’s executive team.  Narcissistic tendencies don’t allow others to flourish instead creating dominant monolithic thinking, “I don’t even argue with him anymore because I always lose.”

• This in turn leads to challenges for succession planning.  Often charismatic leaders leave a vacuum of next generation leaders, having created instead a strong set of followers.

• Life of the party isn’t always “engine of achievement.”  Charisma can be used to achieve personal goals as the primary objective, at the expense of organizational goals.  There is no question it is always best to have alignment of personal and organizational goals so that by achieving one, the other is also achieved.  However, this mandates that the charismatic leader be programmed to strive for a “win-win,” vs. a “win-lose.”   In fancy organizational behaviorist language, this ends up being the difference between those leaders who have “higher activity inhibition” and those who have lower levels.  If a leader has lower activity inhibition, they tend to seek win-lose outcomes with the “win” side being the individual over the organization.

What can the charismatic leader do to counteract negative repercussions?

The charismatic leader needs to ensure that they either surrounds themselves with others who have strong self-confidence and ideation, or that the charismatic leader makes a great deal of effort to cultivate an environment open to sharing other opinions, perspectives, and ideas rather than defaulting to “the charismatic boss.”

As referenced earlier, charisma is really more situationally valuable.  Typically, charisma is most valuable when change is the goal.  Innovation, revolution, new paradigm adoptions are the best projects for the charismatic toolbox.

Some popular examples of positively and negatively directed charisma include the following:

Good = Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the failed Antarctica expedition he saved | John F. Kennedy | Martin Luther King

Bad = Hitler |Jim Jones and the 909 deaths in the Jonestown massacre in 1978 where Jones as dogmatic cult leader got all his followers to commit mass suicide

A few additional interesting links to resources on charisma and leadership

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/01/15/207161/index.htm [lighter reading]

http://www.aom.pace.edu/amj/february2001/waldman.pdf [heavier reading]

As executive recruiters, we often get asked about executive compensation.

So often—after we finish up a search—we aggregate the compensation data we’ve collected across the search, and share it back with the innovation community. In this case, we recently finished a VP Sales  search for a profitable SaaS software client located here in the Northeast  in November, 2011.

Here is the snapshot of compensation highlights from our search—

The footnote at the bottom of the image above articulates the following criteria for the majority of companies in this data set:

There are many variables to consider that influence where to pinpoint one’s own compensation vis-a-vis the above:

]]> http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/vp-sales-executive-compensation-highlights-saas-software/feed/ 3 http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/cfo-compensation-snapshot-vc-backed-software-companies-new-england/ http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/cfo-compensation-snapshot-vc-backed-software-companies-new-england/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:55:51 +0000 Clark Waterfall http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/?p=1971

As executive recruiters, we often get asked about executive compensation.

So often—after we finish up a search—we aggregate the compensation data we’ve collected across the search, and share it back with the innovation community. In this case, we recently finished a CFO  search for a profitable SaaS software client located here in New England in September, 2011.

Here is the snapshot of compensation from our search—

The footnote at the bottom of the image above articulates the following criteria for the majority of companies in this data set:

There are many variables to consider that influence where to pinpoint one’s own compensation vis-a-vis the above:

]]> http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/cfo-compensation-snapshot-vc-backed-software-companies-new-england/feed/ 0 http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/medical-devices-ceo-compensation-snapshot-west-coast-bay-area/ http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/medical-devices-ceo-compensation-snapshot-west-coast-bay-area/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:48:53 +0000 Clark Waterfall http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/?p=1945

As executive recruiters, we often get asked how executive compensation compares between the two venture capital hot spots in the US —  Boston vs. San Francisco.  Yes, these areas are larger than their cities, so the Boston area is inclusive of Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire, and often Rhode Island and Northern Connecticut.   San Francisco is even more complicated, with East Bay, Silicon Valley/the peninsula area, San Jose, and Mill Valley/Marin County covering a huge geographic spread.

So, often after we finish up a search, we aggregate the compensation data we’ve collected across the search, and share it back with the innovation community.  In this case, we just finished a medical devices CEO search out in the Bay area in September, 2011.

Here is the snapshot of compensation from our survey—

The footnote at the bottom of the image above articulates the following criteria for the majority of  companies in this data set:

There are many variables to consider that influence where to pinpoint one’s own compensation vis-a-vis the above: