The New Leadership Toolkit: From Potential to Performance

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Jan 17, 2023, 10:10 ET

Special Guest Rob Tarkoff of Oracle Joins The Miles Group CEO Stephen Miles and COO Taylor Griffin to Discuss Lessons Learned from the Downfall of SBF and Other Silicon Valley Trailblazers

"We've been awed…by the charismatic founder who breaks all convention. We forgot that there are some fundamental things that have to be in place for a business to truly be successful and scale." – Rob Tarkoff

NEW YORK, Jan. 17, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- To succeed in today's business environment, says The Miles Group (TMG) CEO Stephen Miles, "you have to have the toolkit to be performance-driven…This ambidextrous nature of executives that we're looking for must combine a potential-driven mindset –inspiring, motivational, passionate – with the performance-driven aspects of bootstrapping and doing more with less."

In "The New Leadership Toolkit: From Potential to Performance," the episode of C-Suite Intelligence out today, special guest Rob Tarkoff, EVP of Oracle, joins hosts Miles and Taylor Griffin, Chief Operating Officer of TMG, to discuss why we have been so enamored with enigmatic, overconfident, youthful CEOs.

"We've been awed...by the charismatic founder who breaks all convention. We forgot that there are some fundamental things that have to be in place for a business to truly be successful and scale," says Tarkoff.

He explains that the excitement around unicorns – startup companies valued over $1 billion – and other "exotic animals" drove investors to make astonishing bets.

"Boards, executive teams, CEOs are starting to see that being the exotic animal in the zoo is not the answer anymore. Now it's about just tried and true metrics around profitable growth, discipline, financial management, clear product, milestone delivery, and all the things you know that we find boring," says Tarkoff.

Griffin points out that "people do what they're incented to do, naturally," referring to the at-times conflicting goals of hitting targets vs. driving the company to a lucrative payout.

"They're not held to any true performance metrics, and there's no incentive to drive it to that level of discipline," says Tarkoff. "There's nobody minding the store."

"The positive of this is that the customers win. Experimentation is expensive and hard to do in a performance-oriented culture. And because of that excess investment, a lot of great products were developed by sophisticated engineers and companies. You can think of innovations today that we use in our consumer life like Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb – lots of these companies would have never been built if it wasn't for the availability of investment capital," says Tarkoff.

But in order for these potential-oriented companies to thrive long-term, "there will have to be a reevaluation of the company, as well as a reevaluation of executive capability," says Miles.

"There are times when youth, hubris, and inexperience matters. And there are times when experience, discipline, having had a few knocks, and having traversed a few difficult situations matters," says Tarkoff. "The ambidexterity – that's the challenge."

Tarkoff says he's looking for "quality of product and quality of team…People who can help bring these potential-oriented companies into this performance-oriented era…you have to overcome the vestiges of excess."

"The New Leadership Toolkit: From Potential to Performance" is out now on all major podcast platforms. New episodes air every other Tuesday.

Listen and follow on Apple, Google, and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For more information, please contact Davia Temin or Trang Mar of Temin and Company at 212.588.8788 or [email protected].

About the C-Suite Intelligence podcast
CEOs running the world's top companies don't start out that way – they pull ahead of their peers with behaviors and practices that make them the "best of the best." Stephen Miles and the team at TMG coach some of the world's most successful executives, helping them continuously up their game even as business conditions grow more complex every day. Learn the secrets of the highest performers and use this intelligence to power your career. New episodes are released bi-weekly on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

About The Miles Group/TMG
TMG develops talent strategies for organizations, teams, and individuals – focusing on high-performance, world-class leadership. Through assessments and development, coaching, leadership transition planning, and organizational design, TMG helps clients cultivate exceptional talent from the C-suite to the next generation of leaders throughout the organization. Clients include many of the Fortune 100 as well as VC portfolio companies, firms in transition, and organizations around the globe and across industries. TMG has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, C-Suite, Entrepreneur, and Chief Executive. The firm is headquartered in New York City and operates globally. For more information, visit https://miles-group.com. Follow TMG on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Rob Tarkoff
Rob Tarkoff leads Oracle's Customer Experience (CX) business responsible for the front-office application suite, including Sales, Service, Marketing, Content, and industry cloud offerings. His goal is to help companies succeed in providing their customers with the best experience across the front office. Rob spent the past 15 years focused on customer experience, developing products and businesses for both large and early-stage companies; he joined Oracle in 2018. Previously, as president and CEO of Lithium Technologies, Rob created the leading software in online communities, leading to the company's sale to Vista Equity Partners. Prior to that, he ran the Digital Enterprise business for Adobe, leading several key acquisitions. Rob holds a BA from Amherst College magna cum laude and a JD from Harvard Law School.

SOURCE The Miles Group/TMG