

What Does a CEO Do Anyway? - krat0sprakhar
http://www.onlyonceblog.com/2010/09/what-does-a-ceo-do-anyway

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philwelch
Unified theory: a CEO's job is to make sure everything that needs to be done,
gets done.

Suppose you have 20 employees. There are 19 people in the company who have a
defined job. They come in, do their jobs, and go home at night. Of course you
have to make sure those 19 people do those jobs, but when something doesn't
get done by any of those 19 people, you have to do it. Sometimes this means
the CEO washes the dishes.[1] Often, this means that you spend an increasing
amount of time doing a certain job before realizing that you're spending most
of a day doing something you can afford to hire someone else to do, so then
you go hire that person.

Suppose you have thousands of employees. You have more executives than a
startup has employees. You have to make sure each of these executives is world
class. If you're Steve Jobs, this means that you have a world class head of
industrial design, a world class ops guy in Tim Cook, brilliant engineering
execs, and so forth. What do you do? You overlook the product vision, pay
attention to detail, and teach the company how to operate the way you see fit.
Now suppose you're Tim Cook. You have dozens of executives working for you,
many of whom have been selected and trained by Steve Jobs to pay as much
attention to detail and have the same product vision. What do you do? You
overlook the operations and make sure the company has the technical ability to
pull off what the designers and vision guys want to do.

In either case, the basic formula is the same. Take everything that needs to
happen in order for the company to succeed, subtract everything that the rest
of the company is doing, and what's left over is the job of the CEO.

[1] <http://thesash.me/wash-the-dishes-when-nobody-else-will>

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michaelochurch
The CEO's job is to do things that can only be done at the head, and delegate
everything else. Sometimes, this job description includes technological
decisions (this would be the case in small software companies) and sometimes
it doesn't.

On this list would be raising money, hiring and firing at top levels, setting
the culture, and tackling leadership challenges that no one else can.

~~~
philwelch
_The CEO's job is to do things that can only be done at the head, and delegate
everything else._

Obviously by the time you have hundreds of employees you can delegate most of
the work, but at a 20 person company, there are a lot of little things that
fall through that don't necessarily belong on anyone else's plate. And at a
much larger company like Apple, the title of CEO probably doesn't mean the
same thing with regards to Steve Jobs as it does with regards to Tim Cook.

The only constant is that the CEO is the final authority on day-to-day
business. But if I think you followed around 100 CEO's at various sizes of
company, you'd see 100 different workdays. Yes, there are similarities, and
you've named four of them. But there are differences, too. Being the final
authority, and having the final responsibility, means you do whatever it takes
to do what needs to be done as well as it can be. Usually this involves
delegation and hiring, and sometimes you can't afford to do that.

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maratd
It really depends on the size of the company.

On the small scale, you will pay the bills, manage finances, and fill out
paperwork.

On a larger scale, you will focus on recruitment and policy.

On the largest scale, you will focus on vision and direction.

~~~
moe
_On the largest scale, you will focus on vision and direction._

Read: Golf.

~~~
temphn
Perhaps in some old economy industries, but when's the last time you saw a
startup CEO playing golf?

Lots of people think it's all about the idea, and they can just hire someone
to "code it up" and that's the easy part. Lots of people also think that
"vision and direction" is easy and anyone can be a CEO. But few people have
legitimately good ideas that are connected to the ability of the organization
to execute, the general competitive landscape, and the needs of the
marketplace.

Try being a CEO sometime, startup or otherwise, it's not about golf. It's
about the crushing responsibility of making hundreds of decisions a day and
knowing you're the one who is ultimately responsible for the business being
cash flow positive.

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michaelochurch
_Lots of people also think that "vision and direction" is easy and anyone can
be a CEO. But few people have legitimately good ideas that are connected to
the ability of the organization to execute, the general competitive landscape,
and the needs of the marketplace._

Thank you for pointing this out.

For startups, the truth is that it takes a _lot_ more than vision to succeed.
You need the ability to sell people (investors and employers) on something
that doesn't exist yet, a certain tactical acumen, nerves of steel, and quite
a bit of luck. You also need a deep technical knowledge because you can't
evaluate your first technical hires unless you're technical yourself. This is
a tough bill to fit, and vision alone is not enough.

Large-company vision is different, and the problem there is that the people
who have the necessary skills essentially cannot rise to the top. They tend to
be way too passionate to pay their dues, shut up when bad decisions are made,
and plod along accruing influence at a pathetic, glacial pace rather than
attempting to seize power (which doesn't work in a corporate context; you just
get fired). Would Steve Jobs get to the top of any large corporation today?
Fuck no, not a chance.

Generally, people who rise to the top of large companies are mediocre in terms
of visionary ability but extremely _reliable_. They're not all political
sociopaths or assholes; most are perfectly nice people. What they are is very
good at performing well no matter what is going on, what kind of work they
get, and how they feel about what is going on-- people whose performance has
an abnormally low sensitivity to morale and who can therefore sustain middling
to high performance, without faltering, over decades. People who have vision
almost never meet that description, because vision comes with passion which is
another word for getting pissed off when the wrong thing happens.

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diminish
Once Fred Wilson said,3 roles for CEO. Follow the bigger business strategy,
Recruit, and make sure there is enough money in the bank.. or something
similar.

~~~
jonkelly
I loved that post -- it is exactly how I see my job. But the first point is
actually to define & tell the story. <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/what-a-
ceo-does.html>

I'll add that it helps to have personal experience in every role in the
company before you become a CEO. I don't think it's necessarily a requirement,
but it sure helps.

~~~
itcmcgrath
Just to be nit-picky here, but how would being a Janitor help Tim Cook at
Apple?

My point is the usefulness of "personal experience in every role" is a bit,
ah, debatable?

Obviously the Janitor example for Apple is a bit extreme, but where do you
draw the line?

I hazard to say your statement is only applicable for small companies. Perhaps
one where every role has a strategic or tactical impact?

Going on from that perhaps a better statement would be:

"It helps to have personal experience in every role of strategic or tactical
value in the company before you become a CEO. I don't think it's necessarily a
requirement, but it sure helps."

That said, I'm not sure that quite cuts it either...

~~~
viscanti
Obviously you're taking things to an extreme (but understandable, given the
initial remark you're responding to) degree. A better wording would have said
something like "A CEO should know a little (or a lot) about all the c-level
roles". These are the people they'll need to work with and delegate to.

Tim Cook wouldn't benefit from a more thorough understanding of the janitor's
role. He would benefit from understanding operations, marketing, finance and
technology. His ultimate responsibility is to recruit and retain the best
people for those roles. He doesn't need to be world-class at each, but he
needs to be able to identify what world-class looks like for each c-level
role.

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0003
The blog answered what a CEO should do, but what he or she actually does can
be traced to the Board of Director's expectations.

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tirrellp
1\. Raise Money 2\. Recruit Talent

~~~
viscanti
3\. Build Culture

Bonus points for being able to remove stressful situations from the team,
allowing them to be productive. If someone needs to be stressed out, it should
be the CEO, not the team.

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r0sebush
Nothing major that another person could do for less than half the cost

~~~
tsotha
Meh. Everything you don't understand looks easy.

~~~
michaelochurch
Well, here's the situation regarding executive jobs in general. In small
companies, they're hard as hell and don't pay very well, especially when one
considers the career risk. If you're CEO of a startup and it fails, you're
going to have a hard time getting someone to fund you again. In large
companies, they're easy and pay very well. So there's a bizarre discrepancy
(an inverse relationship, in fact) between difficulty of the job and
compensation.

In a small company, the CEO job is so hard that only 1 person in 20 (if that)
has the ability to do it. Getting the CEO right is crucial. In a large company
whose founders have already left, you're talking about smooth-running machines
and who gets the top jobs generally comes down to social climbing more than
anything else.

~~~
tsotha
_In large companies, they're easy and pay very well._

I'm not sure why you think you're in the position to make a statement like
that. CEOs of large companies work almost every waking moment, not something I
think correlates well with an easy job.

I used to play a lot of poker at relatively high stakes. What I found was the
people who didn't play at this level were the ones who were the most confident
in their analysis of the game. How could that guy fold in that situation? Ah,
if only they could scrape up enough money to play they'd show us how it's
done. So they would borrow money from friends or grind the lower stakes games
until they had a big enough bankroll to take a shot at the big game.

And then we'd take their money. Because their confidence was based on the fact
that they didn't even know what they didn't know.

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tententwenty
In companies with stock exchange listings one thing that he likely does is to
sit on the remuneration committees for other CEOs. Who better to judge another
CEO's worth you might think. However as the criteria used to set pay include
the level of remuneration of other CEOs it has led to a situation where CEOs
as a group set their own pay. Unsurprisingly the remuneration of CEOs and
other executives has risen far faster than for employees as a whole. You'd
think shareholders would object to this, but major shareholders in public
listed companies tend to be entities such as pension funds who in turn have
CEOs (you get the picture)

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tsotha
_You'd think shareholders would object to this, but major shareholders in
public listed companies tend to be entities such as pension funds who in turn
have CEOs (you get the picture)_

I think it's more that the amount a CEO makes is insignificant compared to the
company's other costs. Supposedly GE has 304,000 employees worldwide. If the
shareholders decided to pay the CEO $10m less they could afford to give every
other employee an extra $0.63 a week. Whoopie.

And yet the CEO can mean billions of dollars made or lost depending on the
quality of his decision making. As a shareholder if you think you're actually
getting your money's worth you're not going to quibble over ten or twenty
million for the chief executive when the company's market cap is over a
hundred billion dollars.

 _Do_ the shareholders get their money's worth? I don't think there's any
possibility you could answer this question objectively.

