Comment by o_class_star | Hacker News Reader

Comment by o_class_star | Hacker News Reader

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Everyone works for someone else, but at a certain level both of organizational standing and (for lack of a better way to put it) moral fluidity, you become invincible.

CEOs only answer to shareholders insofar as they're expected to deliver a profit, which is actually very easy to do because most business "profit" is actually rent-seeking derived from resources (including intangibles) the business already owns. You have to be incredibly hubristic to fail as a corporate CEO. It's an easy job.

That's not true for small companies. Startups are harder, and startup CEOs are basically middle management within the "hive company" of venture capital. The true executives are the VCs who float from project to project, careers and fates diversified, and can peel their names off anything that looks like it's going to fail.

In big companies, though, most CEOs would do better not to show up, except once a quarter to give a speech or something. All they do is fire people, producing churn, and get in the way of the people who do the actual work. They can only fail if their egos get the better of them and they get so hubristic that they break something that used to be working. The same is mostly true of executives in general, although they have a little more vulnerability insofar as (a) if their bosses screw up, they may end up eating blame, and (b) if the CEO screws up so bad he himself gets fired, they'll probably also be replaced during the regime change.

Do you actually have any experience or even a remotely internal view of how much CEO actually matters in multi billion dollar companies? Or are you just making incorrect assumptions based on no actual knowledge and experience?

In 2000s, there was an ownership dispute between stakeholders of a major Polish telecom (PTC at the time, now part of T-Mobile). It resulted in the company having two sets of CEOs and board members for a couple of years, with all the chaos at the highest levels of the company that could result from it. And yet, the firm plowed on successfully, didn't lose market share and is to this day very healthy.

It makes you wonder how important those big wigs really are. In my current company (a big bank), from what I'm seeing the execs are so far removed from reality by layers and layers of middle-managers who distort and manipulate facts to their favor when reporting upwards, that what the execs think they're managing is really some kind of alternative-universe avatar of the bank. Essentially they're operating in a Matrix created for them by their army of underlings.

There was a nice story that made me realize that in John Brooks' "Business Adventures"

The one about electric companies colluding, where the execs kept telling their subordinates not to collude with competitors, while said subordinates thought it was some sort of inside joke and just kept doing it.

Funniest part is, the execs apparently did not know, while their subordinates thought they were "clearly" communicating they were.

The morale, to me, was that management, at any scale or level, really only has as much power as their subordinates let them have.

And that implicit meanings, in communication, are absolutely and deeply unreliable.

In nearly all mature, publicly traded firms, if the death of the CEO would cause a big disruption for the firm's future prospects, then it is not a well run business. The decisions required at 99% of these mature companies do not require Steve Jobs-esque foresight nor risk taking.

Precisely. These businesses exist to minimize risk, which includes personnel risk. Everyone should be replaceable, even upper management. (Which is to avoid the psychological costs of replaceability or of investing oneself into work one knows that plenty of other people could do-- that is not something companies concern themselves with.)

Not to jump in on this question exactly, but Rakesh Khurana wrote a very well-researched book about the market for corporate CEOs, finding that expectations are hugely inflated with meager correlation between CEO compensation and anticipated results.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=11408

At that level, you don't get the salary your work "is worth", because we all know that's a fictional concept. Dollar value is only well defined for finished products. For labor, it comes down to relative leverage, and as a CEO, you get whatever you can get, and your buddies are on your board and you're probably on their boards, so usually that number is quite high.

CEOs may not be smart in the IQ sense we nerds tend to worship, but they understand leverage and positioning, and they understand how to hack complex human systems for personal benefit, because it's what they did to get their careers in the first place.

If you had to do an analysis. What would you say is the difference between Balmer's and Nadela's Microsoft.

I'd probably argue that's an extreme example but, yes, many CEOs absolutely do make a difference in terms of establishing culture and setting direction and strategy. Certainly bad CEOs can do a lot of damage. And I expect a lot of people saying CEOs don't make a difference would be utterly lost if they were dropped into the position at a large company.

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