There are very few CEOs you should actually take advice from. The most successful businesspeople were never promoted and are an entirely different species from those that were. They share practically nothing with those that were, and if they were an internal hire and not a founder they’d be passed over in the blink of an eye in favor of someone with far more charm than ingenuity and work ethic
Hold on now, there’s different levels of success and many strategies to get there. Being a skilled people person who can start at the bottom and navigate through the ranks is a skill all on its own. Being able to take something that you didn’t make and navigate it through hard times and into success is an indicator of ability just as much as building a business from nothing but an idea. Steve Jobs built Apple into the lifestyle brand it is today from a garage workshop selling mail order kits. He is a success.
Lisa Su is a electrical engineer who started out working on making IBM Power PC chips and eventually helped create the Cell chip used in the PS3 before she joined AMD. She brought her talents to the Zen CPU architecture before becoming CEO of the company. Under her tenure AMD has changed into a powerhouse of performance at prices Intel can’t compete against, turning game consoles and servers into AMD machines.
Success has many forms and snubbing one person’s achievements because they didn’t get in on the ground floor is unfair. Success is based entirely on luck. Hopefully the right person was in the right place at the right time.
You can point out outliers but statistically most CEOs have been selected to some extent for reasons that don’t involve KSAs. Only one such example: average height of a CEO in an S&P 500 company is a standard deviation higher than the average male. Average height of a founder of a top 10 S&P company in terms of market cap is a standard deviation lower (Bezos, Zuck, Huang all 5’7", Brin 5’8", Gates is a relative Goliath at 5’10").
I’ll let you ruminate on the disparity in height between moderately successful promoted CEOs and unimaginably successful founders and why that is such in a culture that views height positively.
Most executives are hard working sure, but also pageant winners. If you want to learn how to claw at colleagues you’ll learn a lot from a random CEO.
There are very few CEOs you should actually take advice from. The most successful businesspeople were never promoted and are an entirely different species from those that were. They share practically nothing with those that were, and if they were an internal hire and not a founder they’d be passed over in the blink of an eye in favor of someone with far more charm than ingenuity and work ethic
Hold on now, there’s different levels of success and many strategies to get there. Being a skilled people person who can start at the bottom and navigate through the ranks is a skill all on its own. Being able to take something that you didn’t make and navigate it through hard times and into success is an indicator of ability just as much as building a business from nothing but an idea. Steve Jobs built Apple into the lifestyle brand it is today from a garage workshop selling mail order kits. He is a success.
Lisa Su is a electrical engineer who started out working on making IBM Power PC chips and eventually helped create the Cell chip used in the PS3 before she joined AMD. She brought her talents to the Zen CPU architecture before becoming CEO of the company. Under her tenure AMD has changed into a powerhouse of performance at prices Intel can’t compete against, turning game consoles and servers into AMD machines.
Success has many forms and snubbing one person’s achievements because they didn’t get in on the ground floor is unfair. Success is based entirely on luck. Hopefully the right person was in the right place at the right time.
You can point out outliers but statistically most CEOs have been selected to some extent for reasons that don’t involve KSAs. Only one such example: average height of a CEO in an S&P 500 company is a standard deviation higher than the average male. Average height of a founder of a top 10 S&P company in terms of market cap is a standard deviation lower (Bezos, Zuck, Huang all 5’7", Brin 5’8", Gates is a relative Goliath at 5’10").
I’ll let you ruminate on the disparity in height between moderately successful promoted CEOs and unimaginably successful founders and why that is such in a culture that views height positively.
Most executives are hard working sure, but also pageant winners. If you want to learn how to claw at colleagues you’ll learn a lot from a random CEO.