6.1. Becoming CEO

“There are generally three kinds of CEOs:

1. Babysitter CEOs are stewards of the company and are focused on keeping it safe and

predictable. They generally oversee the growth of existing products that they inherited and don’t take risks that might scare executives or shareholders. This invariably leads to the stagnation and deterioration of companies. Most public company CEOs are babysitters.

1. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove.

1. Incompetent CEOs are usually either simply inexperienced or founders who are ill-suited to lead a company after it reaches a certain size. They are not up to the task of being either a babysitter or a parent, so the company suffers.

IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad was reportedly worth $25 billion just before his death in 2018. But he lived in a modest house, drove a 1993 Volvo, bought his clothes at a flea market, and never traveled first class. Mary Barra is the CEO of General Motors, where she started at the age of eighteen. Despite being the most powerful female executive in the world and the first female CEO of any car company, she is consensus driven and team oriented, and her personality has been described as “vanilla” and “quiet.” According to Joann Muller of Forbes, Wall Street hailed Barra for accomplishing more in three years than most CEOs do in thirty; under her leadership, General Motors has enjoyed three years of record earnings.

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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.

We found this initiation of a big new strategy push at this year three to four juncture again and again in the journeys of the most transformative CEOs. Mary Barra took charge at GM in 2014, and in her first two years largely focused on urgent shot-term issues. She had to steer the company through the tumult of a scandal that broke just three weeks after she steeped into the job: GM had failed to disclose that ignition switches in some models were causing cars to suddenly shut off, resulting in the deaths of more than 120 people.

Acknowledgments

We were fortunate to be surrounded by some of the best leadership advisers on the planet. We tapped into the wisdom of our colleagues Cathy Anterasian, Ellen Kumata, Tony Byers, Julie Daum, Ann Yerger, Sabine Vinck, Colin Graham, Jordan Brugg, and many others to gain additional context of the inner game that CEOs face day in and day out. Many of them connected us to exceptional CEOs we were keen to include in our research.