

Ask HN: Are CEOS nowadays too soft? - juxta

I was reading Steve Jobs biography and compared how him and Gates were cut-throat and sometimes downright rude. Nowadays it seems like young CEOs like Zuckerburg are kind of soft. What do you guys think? Is it because times have changed?
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zepolen
In my experience, the better CEOs have vision, execution, charisma, massive
egos, luck, high paranoia, no problem with selling out their mother to further
their business and decisiveness or more bluntly, balls.

Gates, Jobs and Zuckerburg possess all those qualities in varying levels.

It's these things that let them do things that most people might view 'insane'
today but in retrospect will be viewed as 'awesome'.

There are plenty of examples in history, and Zuckerburg's best one is probably
turning down a billion dollars for Facebook in the beginning.

He had the vision, massive ego and balls to say No.

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ryanlchan
The way the question is phrased makes it sound like you assume that being
'hard' is required to be a transformative CEO. I don't think this is true. A
great CEO has many tools in his repertoire to motivate and influence people;
cut-throat rudeness is only one of them.

One successful CEO described it to me as such: "If you're Steve Jobs, and you
have that talent, you can be an asshole. For the rest of us though, you can't
be an asshole, because no one wants to work with an asshole. People just want
to do business with a good guy."

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hansy
How is Zuckerburg a "soft" CEO?

Who else do you consider "soft" and why?

You have to remember that nowadays with ubiquitous social media, CEOs have to
be extremely careful about how they act. It's possible Steve Jobs may have
been an anomaly.

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staunch
Steve got kicked out of Apple due to his behavior. Bill wasn't even in the
same league of belligerence.

Very few people are quite as nasty as Jobs and even fewer have the other
qualities that allow people look past it.

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plq
Assuming you mean "were cut-throat and sometimes downright rude [against
employees]", I'd guess it's mostly because talent is much scarcer today than
it was twenty years ago.

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juxta
employees - yes but also to others as well. Steve Jobs was a dick to pretty
much anyone he felt fit and said what was on his mind. I don't see that level
of rudeness in CEOs nowadays (though i'm not saying this is a good or bad
thing)

