The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
hbr.org
hbr.org
For a very long time that was my own journey. I got up to CTO level for a while. Then I realized I just don't enjoy it, so now I'm a senior engineer again. Wanting to be a CEO takes a very specific mindset.
I am surprised at how few of them do, considering how low the barriers of entry to company making in tech are (compared to other industries with heavy requirements in space, equipment, expertise and regulations)
So I am also surprised at your experience. Most devs I know just wanna code.
We all know that developer who wanted to start their own startup/product but felt into hard times and so to keep the lights running they started to do consultancy/freelancing on the side. Then consultancy became their main thing and the startup was sent to the back burner or they just quit the venture entirely.
Same here. Never heard of any developer wanting to be CEO of a big company. Typically startup, yes, but that's mostly for "independence" and doing something cool, faster, etc.
Think they want to run their own large companies.
We probably should just avoid saying "average" and use "mean", "mode", "median", or whatever we actually mean instead.
It’s only when someone says something like the average family rather than saying the average income when things get ambiguous. Typical on the other hand is closer to mean because it’s tossing out outliers.
It is also pretty absurd to assume without explanation that a minority who are especially bad at management have even their minority presence in management given that if sucking matters it should correlate with some type of failure that eventually correlates to drop out.
In fact, it's the other way around - a proof that the person suggesting this doesn't know math.
If 80% are skilled at 1 and 20% are skilled at -100, then most are better than average.
Or: Imagine a room of people. Bill Gates walks into that room. Most people are now below-average wealthy.
There is no such thing as 'not having a boss' unless you live in a cabin in the woods, independent of the world.
Either you work for a corp. with a manager, with what are frankly relatively clear functions - or - you work for the whims of the market and or consulting customers (and possibly a board and investors) in which case you adopt an utterly different tone and there's no expectations of clarity or consistency and you're always on your heels.
I don't think people have an internal conception for how that 'stability, clarity and peace of mind' that they seek is actually a total luxury, something which all those people working out there struggle and toil to create. Like a little cottage on the ocean that doesn't move with the big waves, it's a fabrication, something constructed, not a 'simpler escape' detached from the system.
> A lifestyle business is a business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle.
Second, I also think you have a very common but incorrect view of what a developer even is. You write:
> Most developers who enjoy writing code run away from meetings given the slightest opportunity,
Most developers don't necessarily enjoy writing code. Some do, to be sure, but a lot view writing code as a means to an end. Sometimes that end is money; sometimes that end is to create products. And if what you want is money, or to create new products (or to have new experiences, or to have a fancy job title, etc), all of those are reasons to want to run a large company. (Not all of these are what I would consider good reasons, but they are reasons).
Secondly, you can really hate meetings when your job is to write code, but also would enjoy meetings when your job is no longer only about writing code. Forget running large companies - most people who get even a mid-level manager position will be busy in meetings for a large amount of their time, and will rarely if ever code, and this is considered a very desirable career path by many devs (though not all, to be sure).
This sounds like an unremarkable subset of {vaguely dissatisfied lower-level workers who dream of a new job with far more power, fame, money, and/or interesting stuff}.
Similar are the people who read novels (at least occasionally), and have dreams of becoming a famous author. In my experience, ~0% of them are actually willing to sit down and try to write a 3-page story.
Most engineers like tech, but have little exposure to how they interact with the larger organizational structure and design, with customers, with fundraising, and with a slew of other things. Stepping through a few roles gives that visibility. That makes for a better engineer.
I'll start and end my career in a tech role, but I do periodically do dives into other sorts of roles in the meantime.
If I say "no that would be bad, goes against my ethics, increases tech debt too much, bad for UX, etc." I don't want anybody to override me, even though generally decisions ultimately fall on the CEO.
| # sprinters | # non-sprinters |
--------+----------------+-----------------+
CEO | | |
--------+----------------|-----------------|
non-CEO | | |
--------+----------------+-----------------+
The idea that you need to study 2B people to get at that is absolutely nonsense.
Pretty much the entire genre of "How To Succeed In Business" is nothing but an illustration of survivorship bias. The common attributes that get identified are almost always either also shared by those who didn't succeed or if not were likely irrelevant to the success.
And actually what I did when I formed my first company. I had two plastic cards designed, one for me as "CEO" and another as a press pass with me as "Chief Editor", which actually got me into some expos!
Blogs were new and people didn't know how to treat these "online magazines" and "journalists".
I even had people from big newspapers contact me with requests to use my online comments in their articles. Good times.
So embarrassing to remember, but I had a lot of fun.
Biggest mistake ever was to not find partners asap.
I’m taking one step at a time, my boss being a mentor, giving me responsibilities gradually.
The really hard part is that there is a clear success/fail result from running code.
The success of an interaction with a client ranges throughout a whole bunch of greys. And without experience your evaluation might be off by 100%.
- Go small to go big = It's easier to be CEO in a smaller company. Kind of obvious.
- Inherit a Big Mess = It's easier to be CEO in a situation where nobody wants to be CEO. Kind of obvious, too.
- Make a big leap = Take risky bets, in which case you're not represented in the sample of CEOs when they don't play out.
They reverse engineer CEO's trackrecords... Good thing all these CEO's are blissfully unaware of their relative luck and build upon their own ability to fix anything.
That said, I like that one way this can be read is that being a C-level executive is typically not about some inherent skill or talent. Instead, people simply grow into the role when given (and taking) the chance. This has implications on what a just level of compensation would be.
The "go small to go big" thing isn't about being a CEO of a small company.
It's about taking over a small project, growing it successfully, then using that experience & reference to launch yourself into the CEO position of a large company.
I'd also point out that money is in exchange for something. I would much rather be in a low stress job that pays enough than having more money than I have time to use, ulcers and permanent negative health and behavioral factors that will follow me into retirement..
Of course that line of work sucks!
Do you actually go to work for the money? Or is it more that given your work is broadly fun (, easy for you, etc.) -- that then you focus on money?
What do you think would happen if the work was more challenging than you could manage, wasn't fun, etc. -- would the money then appear as sufficient?
"bold career moves", i.e., right place at the right time, a.k.a., dumb luck
This article looks like yet another one that screams for a survivorship bias disclaimer: https://xkcd.com/1827/
It is exactly as you said, survivor bias and nothing else.
What type of bias is it when you just invent an explanation for something out of thin air?
If you select a sample of observations matching your criteria, and then do a factors analysis of them, you're effectively committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (another way of describing survivorship bias).
If instead you were to randomly select from a cohort of individuals and track their career trajectories, then you'd be looking at what factors contribute most to success.
I suspect the latter might be rather more strongly weighted to the generally-recommended career advice of good school + business degree + management-track positions early in career, though of course, that's precisely the hypothesis that you're trying to establish.
Point being that there are a lot more people who graduate from the School of Hard Knocks and advance through smaller firms (of which there are far more than there are top-school graduates).
Then you get to address questions such as whether or not school actually is determinative in careers, or is merely selecting for those destined to succeed regardless. (There was an interesting incidental study done based on NYC magnet school examination cutoffs, which are quite arbitrary, and for which there's significant evidence that those at least immediately bordering the selection criteria (and possibly more broadly) have roughly equivalent career / earnings trajectories).
Among the few interesting elements in the HBS "study" is the possible role of high-risk gambles in career advancement. That also ultimately points to survivorship bias (it excludes those who took such gambles and lost), though there's the prospect of multiple-iteration games as well. So long as the upside gain (CEO-track) is high, and the downside loss (failed that advancement attempt, but no penalty) is low, there's little harm in making such attempts.
If, however, failed attempts are read as a flag against future consideration, the calculus changes remarkably. This is typical of many "up or out" advancement policies.
"With a ‘Moneyball’ approach to leadership..." review
Sampling/methodology
"One of the reasons for this (stereotypical CEO/survivor bias) is that we tend to limit our thinking to the companies and leaders that regularly appear in mass media. This view—typically focused on Fortune 500 companies—is very narrow. It is also very shallow: we know little about these leaders beyond their seemingly perfect public bios. We tend to ignore the vast universe of companies of all sizes. If you broaden the lens beyond the Fortune 500, there are, for example, over two million companies with more than five employees in the United States alone.5 This means over two million CEOs: a broad, rich set of leadership experiences that don’t often get talked about in the press."
This is a fundamental problem with dismissing all accounts of success so broadly. Multiple-iteration is not a possibility, it’s a certainty.
If you take risk in your career, and you fail, the only way that failure can prevent you from trying again is if you fail so hard that you actually die. Failing to death is a tremendously uncommon occurrence when it comes to taking to taking risks in your career.
The survivorship bias argument really only works if you imagine each person has a single opportunity through their entire life to achieve success. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy isn’t exactly relevant here either, because that is about re-defining the conditions of success after you’ve taken your measurements. The idea of success here is clearly pre-defined.
More broadly though this highlights the importance of thinking through the model and looking closely at methodology. The HBS article itself really doesn't provide sufficient inforation to judge.
It’s a shame, they have the data and could have asked the question.
Yes, this.
Be white.
Be male.
Be ruthless.
Come from an Ivy League institution. If you have trouble being accepted into it, remember that if George bush could get into Yale, every other prick like you have a chance too.
Have no morals.
Despise the working class and fuck them thoroughly every chance you have to show the pricks in Wall Street you are one of them.
Be a sweet talker.
It literally says the opposite. It says having an elite background does NOT correlate strongly with these sprinters.
A lot of it (one of their examples was a woman) is being able to take tough or risky challenges and rise through them.
When I look at traders and investors, I see the same thing. Most of them are a result of being very lucky and aggressive. Only a few of them actually did it without much luck (e.g. Simmons).
I missed that one O:)