Striking a Balance

NYT leadership navigates employee unrest as another CEO offers his help

The guiding principle of the CEO job is balance. Trade-offs. Making decisions that create the most value for your three key stakeholder groups: employees, customers, and shareholders.

You will never make everyone happy… but you have to look at the whole picture and find the path that creates the most value shared by these groups.

The balance that should be in CEOs’ heads as they make any decision

Easier said than done, as any CEO will tell you.

We have an object lesson in that this week as New York Times tech workers begin a strike—right at a very high-traffic moment for the paper.

Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien has previously argued in leaked memos that she does not feel unionization serves the paper’s stakeholder groups, including employees themselves. From her vantage point, the current strike means that customers will not be able to rely on the paper’s journalism and that shareholders will not see maximum efficiency, while employees themselves will end up about where they would have b…