I would be risking the whole company on this decision,” Graham wrote in her memoir, Personal History. Yet to opt for assured survival at the cost of the company’s soul, she concluded, would be worse than not surviving. The Post published.

Part 6: Be CEO

“In 2014, just before the Google acquisition, Nest spent around $250,000 per employee per year. That included decent office space, good health insurance, the occasional free lunch, and fun perks from time to time.

After we were acquired, that number shot up to $475,000 per person. Some of the increase was due to corporate red tape and increased salaries and benefits, but a lot of it was the added perks of free buses, free breakfast, lunch and dinner, tons of junk food, gleaming conference rooms with full A/V setups, and new office buildings. Even IT was expensive. It cost $10,000 per year to connect each employee’s computer to the Google Network and that didn’t even include the price of the laptop.

Over the course of the next month, Tom and Steve went over the possible financial structure in great detail and arrived at a price: $7.4 billion. (It was an all-stock deal—2.3 Disney shares for each Pixar share, and netted out to $6.4 billion because Pixar had $1 billion in cash.) Even if Steve stopped just short of being greedy, it was still a huge price, and it was going to be a tough sell to our board and to investors.

Courage, the saying goes, is not the absence of fear but the ability to act in the presence of fear. Katherine Graham lived and led with fear and anxiety that would never fully abate, no matter how successful, or powerful, or famous, or wealthy she might be or become. Warren Buffett described her as marching forward with knocking knees. Ben Bradlee related that she talked about worrying awake at night, “picking the wool off the blankets.” She paid a hefty Stress and Drudgery Tax, not just in leading through dramatic episodes, but also in shouldering the more routine duties of effective leadership such as giving speeches. Even the prospect of making remarks at the staff holiday party would loom for days or weeks ahead of time, filling her with dread. Graham herself copiously conveyed her inner turmoil; I quick count across her memoir yielded some permutation of words of fear or anxiety (for example, “dread,” “terrified,” “anxious,” “worried,” “fretted,” “frightened,” “nervous,” “anguish”) 289 times in reference to herself.

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The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark

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Introduction

In fact, Dave hadn’t been the first choice for the CEO position, or even the second or third choice. Word was five others had been offered the job before him. What’s more, a couple of years earlier he’d been unceremoniously fired from his position as divisional president at a leading competitor. No one would have suggested from his educational background, either, that he was CEO material. Not only did he not have a degree from an elite school, but it also took him six years to graduate. He hated college and he’d dropped out for a time.

As Dave’s first year in the CEO seat progressed, the sneering assessments of that Florida night prevailed on the Street; the company’s stock slid 40 percent.