If you want to take the system down, provide a better alternative at least. At heart I’m an engineer. I want to encourage people to fix things, not to raise false hopes. Engineers often make good CEOs because they have a built-in desire to make things work. They understand the unique details of a problem and how they all come together in a big picture. They are trained to consistently produce successful outcomes.

But be careful—even if you have a cofounder, there can only be one CEO. And if you pile on the cofounders, you’re asking for trouble. Having two founders works well. Three can work sometimes. I’ve never seen it work with more.

I remember one startup we worked with that had four cofounders. Every decision was made by consensus, which meant every decision took forever. They’d never started a company before, so even the most basic questions were endlessly debated—hiring, product changes, who to take money from, and how to structure the agreement. If they couldn’t agree they would hem and haw, trying to be nice, trying to be reasonable, watering down their opinions until the company fell behind the competition, ran out of money, and the board had to swoop in, remove some founders, and change the whole team around.

People have this vision of what it’s like to be an executive or CEO or leader of a huge business unit. They assume everyone at that level has enough experience and savvy to at least appear to know what they’re doing. They assume there’s thoughtfulness and strategy and long-term thinking and reasonable deals sealed with firm handshakes.

But some days, it’s high school. Some days, it’s kindergarten.

That was true when I first joined the C-suite at Philips and when I became a VP at Apple and when I was CEO of Nest and when I entered the ranks of Google execs. All these jobs felt incredibly different, but at their core the responsibilities were the same—it was less and less about what you were making and more about who you were making it with.

As CEO, you spend almost all your time on people problems and communication. You’re trying to navigate a tangled web of professional relationships and intrigues, listen to but also ignore your board, maintain your company culture, buy companies or sell your own, keep people’s respect while continually pushing yourself and the team to build something great even though you barely have time to think about what you’re building anymore.

It’s an extremely weird job.

6.2. The Board

“Good CEOs walk in with a presentation of where the company was, where it is now, and where it’s headed this quarter and in the years to come. They tell the board what’s working but they’re also transparent about what isn’t and how they’re addressing it. They present a fully formed plan that the board can question, object to, or try to modify. Things might get a little heated, a little bumpy, but in the end everyone walks out of the meeting understanding and accepting the CEO’s vision and the company’s path forward.

Then there are the great CEOs. With great CEOs the meeting is smooth as butter.

And while some of the specific do’s and don'ts for CEOs are unique to their role, most essential things like setting expectations, developing a vision, establishing a management process, creating priorities, building your management team, and doing an exceptional job on your earliest projects apply equally to anyone in a new leadership role.

When Ron Daniel was the managing partner of McKinsey & Company from 1976 to 1988, he sent a memo to new recruits when they started, entitled, “On Becoming an Associate.” His advice is still memorable all these years later: “Recognize the necessity of getting off to a good start in the firm. Your first few engagements are critical. During these studies, you can establish an internal clientele for yourself - that is, by performing in an outstanding way, your reputation will be quickly established in your office and even the firm.” (We’ve incorporated Ron’s memo in the Appendix of the book.)

This is especially important because whenever you assume a new role, you’re in what Max DePree, former CEO of furniture company Herman Miller and author of Leadership Is an Art, calls “a temporary state of incompetence.” Even if you think you know a company - or a department or a division - before you take over its leadership, think again. As GE’s Immelt reminisces, “I worked for this place for twenty-one years before I got the CEO job and there were still things that shocked me when I took over.”

The knowledge gap is even wider for outsiders. “Anyone coming into a new situation is faced with the fact that they often have to do the most at a point they know the least. You may have previous experience and you may be smart and have insight into how things work, but you know the least about the actual company you’re engaged in at the same time you have to set things in motion,” says AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan F. Miller, himself recruited into the company from the outside.