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The way you'd want to do this, I think, is take a selection of people and follow up to see who was the most successful. If it was a 10 year study, they could have easily done it. And the traits seem to be derived from little more than subjective assessment. It's hitting my business school BS detector red flags: an arbitrary enumeration of things that has a weird focus on the exact number of them; vague buzzword laden categories; a lack of reference to related studies and papers; pointless citations to tangentially related information; vague implied promises for success, a "call to action," and other techniques used in marketing; and of course if you follow the link to where their "research" is you get a free personality quiz to determine if you have CEO thetans or whatever, and you can learn more about it by giving them money.

You know, I think the most valuable thing I got from my business degree is being able to precisely identify the exact flavors of bullshit getting passed around in the business world.

> From the results of the study, one would infer that if they adopt these 4 traits, they will become CEOs.

Did you read the article? They were looking at what makes some existing CEOs more successful than other CEOs. Nowhere did they say these traits were what allowed people to become CEOs. In fact they kind of said the opposite - boards tend to over-index on different traits, like overt confidence and extroverted charisma, when hiring.

> From the results of the study, one would infer that if they adopt these 4 traits, they will become CEOs.

How did you reach this conclusion? It is as dumb as reading an article stating that good doctors have an attention for detail and then thinking that you could get a job as a doctor just by demonstrating attention for detail. The article just states that for people who already are CEO's these traits are important and that boards should consider them more, this makes it clear that these traits are not the only things necessary in order for someone to be considered for a CEO position. It even notes in the beginning that most boards undervalues these traits meaning that that someone who focuses on different traits should have greater success in attaining a CEO position.

> It is as dumb as reading an article stating that good doctors have an attention for detail and then thinking that you could get a job as a doctor just by demonstrating attention for detail.

To take your analogy a bit further, CEOs like doctors aren't chosen because they already have these traits.

You become a doctor by graduating medical school, and if you have good attention to detail then you'll be a more successful doctor.

CEOs simply emerge into the role, and if they are also decisive, engaging, proactive and reliable then they're more successful than if they were not.

>From the results of the study, one would infer that if they adopt these 4 traits, they will become CEOs

The article is about what distinguishes successful CEOs, not just what traits lead to people becoming CEOs.

>Don't they need a control group of randomly selected persons?

>In my opinion, a CEO needs to be driven...

I read the study differently. That is, less successful CEOs were the control. So, the idea is that whatever traits led to people landing in the CEO role (including, possibly, being driven); the traits outlined were those that set apart the successful CEOs.

Also wouldn't some of those be traits of a bad CEO? You can be decisively bad... and so on.

I think that the best definition of a good CEO is that the company they run performs well (relative competitors, market).

Of course, now the question shifts to how exactly do you define good performance. But in the end, that is all that matters.

How do you know how much they "run" the company? Perhaps they have another exec who effectively runs the company, or perhaps there are a committee of execs that run the company.

It doesn't matter. If the CEO sets up a committee to do his job for him, and get good results from it, then they are doing a good job.

The Chief Executive is responsible for performance, not for working long hours or making technically brilliant plans.

I love your response. I hate vague sentimentalities like this.

This is most business writing. Most of it is cargo cultism built from post rationalization of survivorship bias. There are so many factors that go into success or failure that it's very hard to ascribe causality, so superstition and folk wisdom prevails.

You find this in lots of other areas with similar characteristics. All "theories of history," etc.

I generally agree. OTOH, it's not as if this stuff cannot be measured at all.

The problem is that what are really just "somewhat interesting observations" tend to be sold (or interpreted) as much more "actionable" than they really are. That is, the implication is that if you go out and do these four things, you'll be successful too.

Seems like 99% of business and self-help advice boils down to this formula.

The lack of science in business blows me away given the money involved.

> "Most of it is cargo cultism built from post rationalization of survivorship bias."

Is this written as a sarcasm to the business writing? ;)

I'm never sure whether I should be amused or horrified by how much business writing tends to run on sentiment and emotion rather than empiricism.

It seems to be more about Management Feels - up to Board level - and not so much about learning how to get things done.

If you can sell a combination of subtle narcissistic flattery with enthusiastic promises of predictability, control, and guaranteed success your books will do extremely well - even if the advice is simplistic harmful nonsense.

I was with you until you proposed your own fifth point as if THAT is the true one. I can posit questions about your point about being driven too.

More or less than most athletes eyeing an Olympic gold?

He says it's his opinion which is different from drawing conclusions from a study

Meaning, driven to be CEO is the initial requirement to becoming CEO (in my opinion).

Honestly, this would have been much more interesting to me if they'd simply asked these CEOs what was it that produced the drive to lead a company.

Not a big believer in generic traits either (I much more believe it's the right combination of the company's situation and the leaders abilities), but didn't they take CEO candidates and compared them to those that made it? And then they looked at outcomes?

> A detailed sample of 930 CEO candidates across the companies of all sizes and covering 19 out of 20 NAICS industry sectors which we compared to other c-suite executives.