
What A CEO Does - mgrouchy
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/what-a-ceo-does.html
======
webwright
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.

~~~
staunch
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?

~~~
webwright
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.

~~~
staunch
You don't discover your vision in a month and then spend years selling it. You
spend years discovering what your idea should be, refining the idea, making
the idea happen, and selling it.

Selling is just a _single_ component. If you had to single anyone of them out
it would be "making the idea happen" and most of that is not selling, it's a
thousand concrete decisions and problems to overcome about the product and
marketing.

Hiring is even less about salesmanship. Convincing someone to join (or not)
takes weeks at most. Finding the right people and making them effective takes
months or years.

I think outsiders probably have a very skewed perspective on Steve Jobs and
most other CEOs because we only see them when they're selling. To outsiders it
looks like 100% of their time is spent selling, so it's natural that people
think that's primarily what they do.

What you don't see is how Jobs is spending his time during the 364 days before
a Stevenote.

------
arethuza
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.

~~~
auxbuss
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.

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

~~~
ulf
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.

------
grammaton
"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
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.

~~~
grammaton
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."

~~~
oz
I suppose it's for the same reason that buildings are attributed to
architects, and symphonies to composers, rather than to builders and
musicians.

~~~
grammaton
Having spoken to actual CEOs, I think it's a bit of a stretch to put them in
the same class as famous architects and composers. The latter are
identifiable, and to some degree quantifiable, skillsets that require training
and a certain degree of talent. I'm not so sure you can say the same thing
about being the guy who makes sure that cross disciplinary paradigms for
excellence synergize with the vision's core values.....

------
joel_liu
Cross reading: [http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-
eval...](http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-evaluates-
ceos/) [http://bhorowitz.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-be-
like-...](http://bhorowitz.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-be-like-steve-
jobs-and-bill-campbell-and-andy-grove/)

------
jasonlbaptiste
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.

------
jsean
Well.. I do that and I also code.

~~~
budu3
<joke>Well, you need to delegate the coding part then.</joke>

------
b0b
A CEO goes out and find the money to keep the executives happy so they go out
and make the business work.

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

------
marze
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
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.

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

------
SandB0x
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&...](http://www.economist.com/node/16685706?story_id=16685706&fsrc=rss))

~~~
byoung2
Those are things the company does _to_ a CEO, not what a CEO does.

