What A CEO Does

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/what-a-ceo-does.html

by mgrouchy • 16 years ago

129 37 16 years ago

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

A former colleague of mine used to say that their role was to "align individual goals with corporate goals."

ulf• 16 years ago

For that to work properly, the CEOs goals have to be aligned with the companies goals in the first place. Like founder-CEO, not like Bank-CEO with no interest in long-term outlook of the enterprise.

jsean• 16 years ago

Well.. I do that and I also code.

budu3• 16 years ago

<joke>Well, you need to delegate the coding part then.</joke>

grammaton6• 16 years ago

"Determines a vision and strategy..."

...and for this nebulous MBA speak, gets paid 40x as much as the people who actually do work.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

Well, it's not always 40x. Here in Norway, it's more often 3x-5x (except in the largest companies.)

And don't knock the value of determining a vision and strategy: people don't just wake up in the morning knowing what they should be doing at the office today/this week/this year. If you don't think a clear vision and strategy matters, just ask Yahoo.

mhd2• 16 years ago

I don't think we neccesarily disagree about that, it's just that "setting a strategy" by itself means diddly-squat, so giving that as your task description is needlessly vague. "Proactively implement executive paradigms"

grammaton6• 16 years ago

I'm glad it's like that in Norway. You're a lot saner than most countries. Here in America 40x is closer to the mark. And i'm not knocking the value of thinking carefully about the next step. That's an obviously important thing. I just don't see why someone should be paid so much more to sit around thinking about the next step than the people who actually implement the "vision."

Alex39172• 16 years ago

It's not really any more nebulous than coding and debugging.

grammaton6• 16 years ago

Yes it is. Coding and debugging are concrete processes with measurable results. They require quantifiable skills and training.

Which one sounds more concrete:

"I cleared out the ticket queue and wrote tests for all outstanding issues"

"I thought about my vision."

jamiequint• 16 years ago

All that "determines a vision and strategy" means is "deciding what the company should do next". Which isn't really nebulous at all, and its impact on the organization can be directly measured by success/failure.

E.g. Ben Horowitz "determined the vision and strategy" for Loudcloud when they moved away from managed services market and spun out Opsware, which led to a 1.6Bn exit. (http://voices.allthingsd.com/20100317/the-case-for-the-fat-s...) Its hard to argue that there was no value in that.

SandB0x• 16 years ago

I was under the impression that a CEO:

Gets rewarded when their company does well.

Gets paid off when their company does badly.

(Golden parachutes: http://www.economist.com/node/16685706?story_id=16685706&...)

byoung2• 16 years ago

Those are things the company does to a CEO, not what a CEO does.

mhd2• 16 years ago

4. Come up with pithy slogans that will impress your underlings.

b0b• 16 years ago

A CEO goes out and find the money to keep the executives happy so they go out and make the business work.

mathgladiator• 16 years ago

The CEO also makes the executives get along to work together effectively.

webwright2• 16 years ago

The interesting thing about this is that it boils down to sales. The CEO sells/evangelizes a vision internally and externally. The sell the idea of working at the company (recruiting). Early they sell the dream to investors and the earliest revenue deals (whatever they are). Later, their sales efforts might be limited to bigger deals/partnerships and recruiting other leaders for their company.

I wonder how many founders on Hacker News (who are aimed at big growth) want to be this type of CEO. And I wonder if there are any other types of CEOs at the top. I've never met any.

staunch2• 16 years ago

You're looking at it through your own prism. Selling is just a prerequisite (along with multiple other skills), it's not the most important part of being a good CEO.

Discovering the right strategy/vision of the company is not a sales job. Communicating it to people is though.

Choosing the right people to hire isn't sales either. Convincing them to join is though.

I think it's very harmful to boil down the role of a CEO to merely salesmanship. There's so much more that matters at least as much.

Thought experiment: Where would Steve Jobs be now if all he had was his master salesmanship, but none of his design and product skills?

webwright2• 16 years ago

Your examples illustrate my point (which was not that being a CEO is MERELY salesmanship, but that it-- in terms of time spent-- is mostly salesmanship.) Of course it'd be silly to say that it's merely salesmanship. If I had a crappy vision and I was an epic salesman, I'd be a pretty lousy CEO, right?

In all of those tasks, how much of your time are you spending selling? Discover/find your vision, spend the rest of your career selling it. Deciding who you want to hire and the persuasive dance (where you have to persuade them that working at your company is a good idea AND sell them your vision to boot!) takes a lot more time.

Steve Jobs is a great example. As product-focused as he is, what % of the time do you think he spends tinkering or wireframing? I'd wager he's selling/reinforcing ideas for most of his day. Steve Jobs is different because he spends 99% of his sales time selling vision/product ideas versus all of the other types of persuasion he could engage in. Oh, and because his ideas are unusually good. ;-)

edit: I'd add two things. Once, I've run 2 different companies for about 70% of my 13 year tech career and two: I really don't enjoy sales as much as I enjoy other work tasks. So if I am looking at it through my prism, it's the prism of my experience.

joel_liu• 16 years ago

Cross reading: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-eval... http://bhorowitz.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-be-like-...

arethuza• 16 years ago

From bitter experience, I think the statement about setting "overall vision and strategy" should have a qualification so that the vision and strategy stays in place for at least as long as it takes to actually build something and deliver it to someone who uses it.

If your company "vision and strategy" changes more frequently than a development team can react then you are doomed.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

While that sounds reasonable, by your suggestion no policy can ever be changed if it is found to be too expensive to complete.

Thats no good either.

auxbuss• 16 years ago

That's one reason why a business must have a competent CIO on the management team.

Sometimes you can let the apparent changes ride, since they are politicing between other senior members of the team; sometimes you can simply say, "No"; and sometimes you must explain the cost of what will be thrown away, how it will affect morale, and how long pivoting the team, re-motivating them, and delivering will cost.

You average CEO, finance, marketing, and sales honchos will not understand these things without an interpretation into their language.

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

See this is why your CEO needs to be technically competent to some level. If they are hiring and setting the vision for the entire company, you can't build a good product if you don't have the basic technical understanding yourself.

marze• 16 years ago

Steve Jobs has been listed as the #1 CEO in the USA. He seems to be doing a great job on 1 through 3, and has #3 particularly in the bag. He may do other things as well, but you couldn't say he has in any way shortchanged any of these three jobs.

DougBTX• 16 years ago

I'm not going to comment on the content of the article, but I'd like to take a second to point out how clever the writing is. I like how the first paragraph tells you about what you're going to hear: it's something special from the real world. Then he talks about getting his start in, lets say, the mid 80s. About 25 years ago. Then we hear of another VC, very experienced, that's 25 years you know?

A nice way to say, "I'm experienced, listen to me." He's probably right too.

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