How to Become a C.E.O.? The Quickest Path Is a Winding One | Hacker News Reader

How to Become a C.E.O.? The Quickest Path Is a Winding One

nytimes.com

133 pointshvo65 comments

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)

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.

Also, have the luck to work on successful projects, as individual impact is impossible to measure.

Very true, although you can probably enhance luck with canny political wrangling and the like.

Seems like charisma would be pretty valuable for anyone delegating or making external deals.

It is, but it can unfortunately blind people to a lack of other qualifications. Of course, I don't mean that "charismatic people are unqualified". Obviously Steve Jobs was quite charismatic and did impressive things for his company. Bill Gates meanwhile, I like a lot more as a person, but I'd find it hard to argue for his "classical" CEO creds of charisma and imposing presence.

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...

All men.

Correct. The post I replied to did not talk about possible gender issues, but about certain (physical) characteristics that CEOs supposedly have.

Germany also has a much longer tradition of promoting engineers rather than sales, marketing, and finance types.

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.

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.

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

Like this [0] guy?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

Clear case of success via good looks.

Checks height 5'8" damn it. Well at least you have to admit that he's a latter day Adonis. Ok, maybe he's the exception that proves the rule?

Kidding aside, "not all" has to be implied in any broad description of a group like this. Bill Gates would be another example of someone who enjoyed incredible success without those qualities.

Both of those guys became CEO by founding the company. You want to look at CEOs who were hired/promoted to the role.

That's certainly true, and if you can, you should improve your first impressions (plastic surgery, fashion, and later genetic cosmetics I hopefully imagine). Of course charisma also includes a whole lot of other things (psych, NLP) and that is quite a rabbit hole, but a worthwhile one.

But for things you can't change, I wouldn't quite worry. Because you can't change it. There are too many things you can change, why worry about being taller?

For statistical analysis, you are absolutely right. For personal growth, that statistic is probably irrelevant.

That's pretty much true, and even when it isn't there's no way to tell except in hindsight. It's best to give your full effort and as you say, try to relentlessly self-improve, because that at least has some hope of working.

Unless you want to be a female F500 CEO, then you're out of luck, which is a sad thing to be saying in in this millennium.

Out of luck is a bit strong. 22 of the S&P 500 companies have a female CEO. While that's far from balanced, it's also far from "out of luck", IMO.

>Unless you want to be a female F500 CEO, then you're out of luck...

Of which, only 4 are female, and that's what I explicitly was talking about, as opposed to S&P. To be honest though, 4.4% of S&P CEO's, when women are a bit more than 50% of the population is almost as ugly as .8%.

About charisma, I found this book really useful: http://foxcabane.com/book/

He left out the part where one must have a ruthless commitment to the goals of the company (or less charitably, oneself) at the expense of people.

An example from Napoleon's life was Marengo [1]. One of his generals (Massena) was besieged by the Austrians in Genoa. Napoleon had to make a choice between rescuing him - as he had requested - or cutting off the main Austrian force led by von Melas which was making inroads towards France; he did not have enough men or time to do both. His decision to cut off von Melas paid off in eventual victory, the reappearance of "independent" Italy for the first time in centuries, and peace for France, but cost him the city and Massena's friendship, as the latter felt betrayed, raison d'etat be damned.

In another famous instance [2], he loaded grapeshot in canons and fired at massed French citizen in the streets of Paris to defend the Revolution from Royalists. His calculation was that if he slaughtered a few in a brutal manner, he'd shock the rest into retreat; he pulled it off, saved the revolution at the cost of only a few hundred lives, and was rapidly promoted thereafter.

In both cases, Napoleon's own interests were aligned with that of the country and its people. In other cases, such as choosing a policy of economic protectionism as a response to Britain's industrial revolution being too advanced to compete against, or reinstating the Catholic Church as the official state religion and making succession hereditary once again, one could argue they were not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marengo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Vend%C3%A9miaire

Sorry for not replying earlier, but we deployed an app to a big government department and I've been working an obscene number of hours.

This is a truly excellent response and I especially appreciate your examples. They illuminated two very important things to me:

1.) Sometimes, when we look back at our success or failures, we tend to attribute them to those things that are most favourable to us.

2.) Sometimes people who reach great heights get there at the expense of their friends or family. I would love to find some research on how divorce rates change depending upon career success.

Thanks again for your excellent comment!

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.

Good old Ben.

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

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

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

I got this as an audiobook about two months ago but never got around to listening to it. This convinced me to give it another shot :)

I've spent my career at early stage companies, sometimes as CEO sometimes as CTO and many times as an engineer.

It may be right that you become trained to be a Startup CEO by being a Startup CEO, because there are some things that you cannot get any other way. However, you can get a lot of the necessary perspective as a Startup Employee and then Startup Founder. This way you will start with a big leg up compared to a CEO who has no startup experience. I think probably it would be a good best practice for us entrepreneurs when starting our career to start as employees, then on our second job be founders, then if you want the third company would be the one where you become CEO. Thus when you are founding a company, look for someone who has previously been a founder and an employee, to be your CEO. I'm not saying you need a grey hair, but someone who has been on the roller coaster before and who knows what he is signing up for. First job out of the gate as CEO is romanticized by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg et al. but it's not the best chance for your company. Generally.

Also, critical for a Startup CEO is that the CEO have training in the primary industry of the company.

IF you're disrupting real estate sales, and your primary competitive advantage is legal or structural (eg: an old school not really technical business) the CEO needs to be a salesman. In this way the CEO is experienced in the primary area that determines success.

If you're doing this with software, however, the CEO needs to be an engineer (not a salesman.) As an engineer who has learned to sell (by being a sales engineer, after creating an evangelism department which became our marking department) learning to sell was rather easy, and a CEO as salesman can work with pure salesmen very well, with the CEO coming in as the Closer.

But a CEO without an engineering background who is trying to manage a company whose primary business is software development is going to be a problem-- the only way this works is if you have a co-founder who is an engineer and is effectively in total control of the technology side.

Maybe a better characterization is that, sales is a skill that can be taught. Certainly talented sales guys have a talent that can't be taught, but anyone can be taught to be a competent sales guy. Engineering does involve skills that can be taught, but that capacity for grasping engineering concepts, that seems to not be something you can teach. Either that or I've just seen a lot of non-engineering CEOs who didn't care to learn enough about engineering not to undermine it.

The number one killer of startups in my experience is arrogance and the Dunning Kruger effect (they are linked.) VCs forcing bad pivots on companies because some MBA with 2 years experience as a junior associate at a VC firm thinks the company (run by industry veterans with 20 years of experience) should chase the latest fad for example (and yes I've seen exactly that though most cases are less obviously asinine.)

But I've also seen the CEO who thinks because he's CEO he HAS to "Make Decisions" or he won't have "authority" undermining the technology side he knows nothing about... but is too arrogant to realize he's the cause of the companies problems. That I've seen a whole lot too[1].

A lot of the founder fights I've seen have been due to this too-- the CEO keeps pushing the CTO to do something wrong, that the CTO knows is wrong.

So, the real thing I would look for in a CEO of a startup is that they are the kind of person who is not focused on their own ego, not arrogant.

In fact, I'm starting to think that the CEO role is itself obsolete.

First off, there's three people in the company and one of them's title is "Chief executive officer"? Three words none of which actually involve getting things done?

I think a better arrangement might be one that is flatter where at the top of the org is a committee made up of the heads of the departments who have to reach consensus, with the Chairman of the Board being the tie breaking vote... but it should never come down to votes. There should be someone who is on that committee who is understood to have the best product vision and who has the loyalty of the rest of the committee regarding the product vision. That could be the chairman (in which case he acts like CEOs do now, only less involved in the day to day stuff where he may be tempted to meddle.)

I'm not completely sold on this idea, just thinking about it. At any case, the totally hierarchical 5 layers of management in a 50 person company structure is out of date by about 50 years I think.

[1]Example of the above: Stopping engineering from using an issue tracking system (which he was not interested in logging into even though it built burndown charts and predicted ship dates and gave him great visibility) and forcing everything to go onto a single medium sized white board with sticky notes. (which are constantly falling off!) So, instead of QA writing up an issue with reproduction steps, we are working of of vague notes on sticky notes, like "server disconnects from peer", or "memory is too much". This has dramatically slowed us down, probably, along with other process undermining decisions, cost us a good 2 months in the past 5 of delay, etc. But of course its engineerings fault for not meeting the (arbitrary) deadlines he picked. (Yes, I'm a little bitter, it sucks to see a potentially great company tanked by this kind of stuff. It's salt in the wound to see the business guys running around arrogant and making comments about how bad engineering is, when we can't even get them to give ups a spec, let alone participate in an agile process.)

unless some paperwork requires a c-level title to authorize, we call our co-founders 'principals'. everyone still has an executive role.

this is slightly different than 'managing director' which seems to be favored by east coast firms or within business units of larger firms but is basically the same idea.

I like that idea a lot. I know there are some government requirements that a CEO or CFO sign off on various paperwork. In a holocracy, you could have those be roles that one of the Principles energizes.

Thanks for writing this, a blog post is probably a better format than a nested HN comment. I think it would help get this great comment much more visibility.

I couldn't agree more with that. The formal education is great but doesn't give you the practical street-skills you need. Post-grad degrees prepare you for a career in academia. Being CEO (or really any other position that matters) requires cross-functional thinking. Most popular route between engineering <=> business is usually business analytics[0].

The article does feel a bit click-baity when you consider how broadly the concept can be applied. Everyone should really think out of the box ... be curious about the bigger picture. Don't be a drone, etc ... so in the end not sure what I read :-)

[0] https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/10/31/the-role-of-...

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

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).

For most of the world, being CEO means being CEO of an established company rather than a startup. And really, incorporating a company and making yourself CEO doesn't amount to much. There's a lot of work to do before the title means anything. And much of that work dovetails with the point made by the author of the article: CEOs need to know a lot about a lot of different things.

I came here to say this, but also to add, that the fastest way of becoming a fortune 500 CEO, is to already be one.

Although, if you do manage to grow your company to a fair size, these days you might be able purchase a company (via a ton of leverage) with some name recognition cook the books for a few quarters and then jump to a bigger fish. By the time anyone notices you can claim your golden parachute and retire into politics.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

Actually your chances are increased if you come from the middle class. I might get downvoted for writing this, but the poor have a harder time because of their lack of access to education and the rich have it 'harder' in the sense that they don't have certain motivations to work harder. These are tendencies of course, not the general case.

I remember reading the Forbes 30 under 30s stats once and seeing that >60% came from a middle-class family.

I'm just 22 years old but from what I've seen for the moment from people around my life, this is what happens: Guys with really rich parents end up at an important role at their dad's company; and once their dad retires they become CEO. On the other side, middle-class guys are the ones starting up startups and companies in general; which ends up making the number of middle-class CEOs superior to the number of high-class CEOs.

According to an article version of this that looks like it was syndicated to local media outlets, 64% self-identify as coming from a middle-class family. That says almost nothing about where their household actually was in the income or wealth distribution.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

No comment (or opinion) on the content of your post but you clearly express an opinion that you put some thought into, no reason for anyone to downvote you. Upvoted to counter it.

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.

This is based on a survey of Doctors. For those who have not worked with Doctors, or seen the Showtime series "House of Doctors", 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 doctor.)

As an ex management consultant I can say that I saw not only many different job types within that description, but also many degrees of competency within those roles. It's not fair to apply sweeping generalisations to any class of people, be it consultant, software engineers, designers, venture capitalists, or people of a particular race, religion, ethnicity or gender orientation.

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