Imagine you are the Chief Executive Officer of a company. As the title implies, you are the one making the decisions and calling the shots. Or are you? Maybe you are just the face of the company, while a team that you handpicked to serve under you completes all the tasks necessary to keep the business upright. Apparently, there are people in the business world who take both sides.
On the one hand, Boris Groysberg writes for the Harvard Business Review that “It’s Harder than Ever to Be a Senior Executive”. He lists five reasons why a leadership position within a company is not only hard to maintain, but also getting increasingly difficult to obtain. Groysberg argues that a well-qualified candidate should own exemplary soft and hard skills; that one should be as good communicating with people as analyzing data and making decisions, especially because industries are becoming global. Furthermore, he claims that executive level positions are becoming “increasingly interdependent”. Jack-of-all-trades, not specialists, are the people that rise to the top of organizations. Finally, Groysberg states that an executive must always continue to learn, due to the constant fluctuation of rules, information, procedures and relationships that compose the modern business world. In sum, no CEO, no matter how powerful the company, can just reminisce about the past while his/her subordinates search to innovate.
On the other hand, Doug Poretz, author of the first comment on Groysberg’s post and a self-claimed reporter to a CEO for over 40 years, argues that the job of CEO requires only establishing a vision, sticking to that vision, and then structuring the rest of the executive team to execute it. After those three objectives are completed, Poretz says, the CEO can ‘Get the hell out of the way’.
So which is it? How “in charge” is a CEO. Based on what we have studied in class, I could not disagree more with Poretz. While studying McDonalds and Dell, we noticed that only certain individuals, Jim Skinner and Michael Dell respectively, were able to propel their companies forward and make them profitable. When others, like Kevin Rollins for Dell, were given the reins for a few years, even though they stuck to the original plan, still failed. Skinner and Dell have demonstrated that they contain the necessary qualities to be successful executives, and it truly shows in their absences.
I also agree with Groysberg’s argument that an executive position is becoming harder to perform. Technology is truly shrinking the world, and people from different continents are doing business with each other on a regular basis. Communicating with others from foreign backgrounds, whether it is through learning a new language or even finding something in common through hand motions, is just as vital for a CEO as reading through a statement of cash flows, though it is necessary to know how to do both.
Perhaps an answer to this question will be created when evaluating Apple’s performance in the coming years. After the passing of longtime CEO Steve Jobs, it will be interesting to see how well the company continues to innovate with its production, and whether or not it can maintain the sizable competitive advantage it has for so long.
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