🥸 Unreliable CEO, Part One

I am reliable at many things. Being a CEO isn’t one of them.

If you’re wondering who tanked the once-thriving B2B part of my business, you might peel the plot curtain back just a bit farther than the pandemic to reveal . . . me. Your unreliable ‘Doh narrator.

Wayne Booth, author of The Rhetoric of Fiction, first coined the term (emphasis mine):

“I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work, unreliable when he does not.

. . . Nor is unreliability ordinarily a matter of lying, although deliberately deceptive narrators have been a major resource of some modern novelists (Camus’ The Fall, Calder Willingham’s Natural Child, etc.). It is most often a matter of what [Henry] James calls inconscience; the narrator is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him.”

One morning on a work trip to Paris in 2019, I was enjoying scrambled eggs and coffee in the restaurant of a busy corporate hotel before my training day started.

No one would mistake me for a Parisian in a million years, but if my less-than-fashionable clothes and big-boned frame weren’t screaming 🇺🇸AMERICAN🇺🇸, the cover of my book surely did—with its charmless blocky orange font and ambiguous hardcore imagery (gear? tire? overworked keyboard?):

I brought the paperback edition of Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman on my trip, a vestige of my Peak CEO Era. That’s not saying much, as I had no employees, but I still had delusions dreams of building an even more scalable, profitable company.

I had flown two facilitator friends out on my dime to shadow me while delivering a two-day Train-the-Trainer, so that if demand for Pivot services skyrocketed, I would be ready. My time and energy as the CEO wouldn’t be the bottleneck.

The problem is, I was so bored reading Traction during that trip that I didn’t even bring it home with me—rare for a book lover.¹ Instead, I took photos of the key information, leaving the book behind in the hotel room to lighten my suitcase.

In one of my record-keeping photos, I highlighted a list of “advantages to giving everyone in the company a number:”²

1. Numbers create accountability

2. Accountable people appreciate numbers

3. Numbers create clarity and commitment

4. Numbers create competition

Even now reading it back, the list gives me hives. A “good” business owner would care passionately about numbers and clarity and teamwork and solving problems faster. I didn’t, not really. I cared about the work, but I was never obsessed by the numbers.

The cracks in my CEO facade were starting to show.

I kept thinking I could get myself there—to the land of Good Small Business CEO. Soon after that trip, I updated my website bio to start as follows:

Jenny Blake is the founder and CEO of Pivot Method, a growth strategy company for helping people and organizations map what’s next.

I wanted to sound fancier, of course. I figured this version would make more of an impression than being introduced as my activities—author, speaker, podcaster, and/or career and business strategist.³

I wanted the read-in to speeches and podcasts to more accurately reflect how I spent my time: building a business with scalable, recurring, mostly passive revenue streams. I would no longer be “Jenny Blake career coach” but rather Fancy Business Operator Jenny Blake, a 💥fOunDeR and cEo💥 who licenses IP to corporations.

Except for one thing: the word CEO always read a little bit like a record-scratch when I heard myself or someone else say it, sandpaper to the soul. It sounded so corporate, so massive, so responsible.

Still, I tried it on for a bit. Act as if, right?

Investopedia offers a formal definition: from the highest-ranking perch in an organization, the Chief Executive Officer is responsible for “expanding the company, driving profitability, and improving share prices for public companies.”

While it is true that I “manage the overall operations of [my teeny tiny] company,” I have not done whatever it takes to expand or drive profitability. You’ve seen my to-do list and my balance sheet. I follow my ✨✨ sOuL’s CaLLiNg ✨✨. Try telling that to a public company or their investors 😂

One of the biggest challenges of the ambiguous loss I am experiencing while in this caterpillar-turned-goo-state (butterfly self nowhere in sight) is not just navigating the dramatic loss of earnings, but the loss of identity.

Who am I if not a successful business owner? Who am I if I am failing at the role after thirteen years of succeeding at it?

All I know is that for some reason tied to intuition—having nothing whatsoever to do with chasing numbers—I continue climbing down the entrepreneurial ladder.

It only occurred to me last summer after getting The News and not running after more corporate work: I am an unreliable CEO.

And I seem to prefer things that way.⁴

❤️

1. To be fair, I re-read it a few years later and found it much more illuminating. But I still failed wholesale at implementing EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), the core its teachings. I got as far as creating a Notion template, then left it to gather digital dust.

2. From Traction, the complete list of advantages to giving everyone in the organization a number (that I didn’t care enough to capture in-full at the time 😂):

1. Numbers cut through murky subjective communication

2. Numbers create accountability

3. Accountable people appreciate numbers

4. Numbers create clarity and commitment

5. Numbers create competition

6. Numbers produce results

7. Numbers create teamwork

8. You solve problems faster

3. I have since removed “founder and CEO” from my bio. Author does just fine.

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