
How to Become a C.E.O.? The Quickest Path Is a Winding One - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/upshot/how-to-become-a-ceo-the-quickest-path-is-a-winding-one.html?ref=business&_r=0
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hluska
A guy I used to work for once described his path to the top of a large company
as, "being lazy enough to want to delegate everything, having enough
experience in enough fields to know who to delegate to, and being smart enough
to know what tasks are worth your time."

(That's paraphrased slightly)

~~~
M_Grey
It's probably not going to be a popular sentiment around here, but other
helpful factors are being tall, a full head of hair, and charisma.
Unfortunately it often seems those qualities, while not the active ingredients
in a good CEO, are the ones most often found in CEOs.

~~~
quonn
Charisma is hard to quickly measure and height might be a bit more work, but I
sampled 10 of the CEOs of the largest German companies [0]. Most of them did
_not_ have a full head of hair.

[0]
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorstandsvorsitzender#Liste_de...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorstandsvorsitzender#Liste_der_Vorstandsvorsitzenden_der_DAX-
Unternehmen)

~~~
M_Grey
This hurts to admit, but when I searched to find where I had gotten that
idea... it was a survey on USA Today! I'm ashamed. In fact what I did find was
a bunch of CEO's expressing a total willingness to be spear bald if it they
could gain a few inches of height.

So please disregard the hair comment, I was wrong.

~~~
pravda
When I read about the hair, the first thing I thought of was Steve Ballmer.
Then I thought of Jeff Bezos. Then Andreessen. Then Horowitz.

And then I came to this conclusion: you certainly don't have to be handsome to
be a CEO! It is democratic in that way.

~~~
M_Grey
Of all of those, why am I positive that we're both imagining Steve Ballmer's
shining face/pate? "Woooo!"

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godzillabrennus
Ben in the book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" summed up how one becomes
ready to be CEO of an early stage company nicely. You become trained to be a
CEO of an early stage company by becoming the CEO of an early stage company.

It's not a defined role, its deserved by someone who is capable of pulling off
success in business by controlling anarchic situations. It's not like they can
teach the skills to do that in school.

~~~
freyir
Good old Ben.

Ben Horiwitz of Andreessen Horowitz if anyone was wondering, like I was.

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pyromine
Although in-case anyone, like yourself, is unfamiliar with Ben Horowitz The
Hard Things about Hard Things is perhaps one of the most interesting business
books available.

I find it's applicability beyond just business makes it as fundamental as How
to Win Friends and Influence People.

With that said, yah it is a little weird that on hackernews if I see Ben
without an additional qualifier I presume Ben Horowitz

~~~
icpmacdo
Additional recommendation of Zero to One by Peter Thiel, I feel like its in
the same section of essential startup business books.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
The answer isn't quite technically correct. The absolute quickest path is to
incorporate a company and then make yourself the CEO.

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auganov
They're only looking at companies with 200+ employees in their data (which is
the right thing to do given what "being an executive" means to most people).

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seattle_spring
Huh. If I were to go off of all the resumes that come across my desk, I would
have thought the quickest way to becoming a CEO is to:

1) Go to a hacker school like Hack Reactor

2) Start a website that takes you ~8 weeks of spare time to build

3) Call yourself CEO of that website and ask for $180k salary!

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ChuckMcM
Hah, back in the dot com days it was the 8 weeks Cisco Certified Engineer
program and then you were a "network architect" and due $180K a year.

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xyzzy4
The quickest path is to be born into a rich family with connections.

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o_____________o
You're getting downvoted, but this is more true than I cared to admit for most
of my adult life. I've witnessed this first hand from newly minted
billionaires to green CEOs: most of them had important connections in place to
receive and amplify their goals. You could also examine the type of language
and non-verbal values that are exchanged between investors and "rich kids".
Sometimes it's like watching a father grooming a son.

~~~
Spooky23
For an established company, absolutely. Being a rich or powerful person's kid
is tough. You're stuck with high expectations, but simultaneously face a low
bar.

Basically, if you're not a total idiot, you end up running things.

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hodgesrm
The more interesting question is how to become a _successful_ CEO. One thing I
have noticed is that good CEOs can frame important problems in a way that
allow other people (ideally good ones that the CEO hired) to solve them.

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hammock
On the interactive chart- why does the likelihood of BECOMING a CEO go UP with
greater experience? Wouldn't it go down over time, as in, if you haven't made
CEO yet you never will?

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stenius
If it's a numbers game, the more swings you take, the more balls you hit.

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hammock
What I'm saying is, the more experience you have the less you have ahead of
you, so that should close off future opportunities. Whereas if you have only
10 years of experience, you still have 15 years to make better decisions than
the folks with 25 years experience, whose 25 years are already determined.

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milkytron
So then if you had zero experience and it was your first day working in your
life, the percentage of becoming a CEO would be the total CEOs of the world
divided by the total workers of companies with CEOs which I feel is quite
small. Thus, it could only go up.

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hammock
Total CEOs _over your remaining lifetime_ , which is a number much greater
than any snapshot in time. And if you have 25 years of experience, your
remaining lifetime is shorter.

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yuhong
As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now,
with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a
good candidate for such a public company.

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ksec
Unfortunately, in many other industries, sucking up being the first on the
list.

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gjolund
I always thought the quickest way was to create a linkedin account.

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myf01d
1\. Be born to the right family.

2\. Be asshole enough to manipulate people working for you and get credit for
their work.

3\. Be a good actor and convince others that you really know what you are
doing.

4\. Be smart enough to not get into details.

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booleandilemma
Being tall helps immensely with # 3. It will add weight to anything you say.

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20yrs_no_equity
This is based on a survey of Management Consultants. For those who have not
worked with Management Consultants, or seen the Showtime series "House of
Lies", these are not the guys you want to be your CEO. (The TV show is
fictionalized, of course, but it's based on a book written by a management
consultant.)

Their characteristics are rapaciousness, self focus, political and emotional
manipulation and greed. They do well for themselves, not so well for the
company.

So, I question the premise of this article from the beginning as its source
material is not successful CEOs who spent more than 10 years at the company in
question or in the CEO role.

Edit: I see I'm being buried. To be fair, there's a difference between a
"management consultant" and an consulting engineer. consulting engineers get
stuff done. Management consultants can also come up with great ideas (as shown
in the show I referenced above) and can legitimately add value. But they are
best as consultants, not employees and not CEOs. Of course generalizations are
false if applied strictly- there are exceptions.

I just think that a better survey of successful CEOs would be necessary to
draw any serious conclusions.

AND - more specifically- having worked with management consultants and a
variety of CEOs of startups who didn't have startup backgrounds, for a startup
you generally don't want a management consultant as your founding CEO.

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sgt101
Yup.

There is a group of folks who fit the management consultant profile, and as
you say, they can add value if well policed and in the right place.

There is also a group generated by the "red queen" characteristics of
corporate life. These are the folks who are optimised to appeal to seniors
with polish and politics, but who have no real bottom. I've only seen a few of
them rise up (and not to the very top) it's not good to be around them when
the reckoning comes.... Peacocks don't do well round foxes.

