Surrogate Markers For Recognising Good CEOs
The world of business is full of so-called “professional CEOs”. You probably know the type. The thing is - I’m not quite sure why they’re called “professional” because they tend to be particularly ineffective in their jobs. So often, these people lack the ability to do anything other than run their companies by acting like sheep. They set directions for their businesses that simply follow what everyone else in their sector is already doing. More often than not, that’s a recipe for failure. It never ceases to amaze me that Boards of companies keeping hiring these kind of people. So, I thought I’d suggest a way it’s (often, but not always) possible to separate the good CEOs from the dross, without having to look into their capabilities in great detail. Surrogate markers of “CEO capability”, if you will.
First, let’s define “good”, because, to some extent, this kind of thing is a matter of opinion. Some examples of good (in my opinion) CEOs that you’ve probably heard of are: Steve Jobs of Apple; Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems; Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, and Marc Andreessen (who doesn’t happen to be a CEO, but obviously could be if he wanted to). All are very obviously bright individuals; all are articulate; and all have been known to rub people up the wrong way from time to time! I think these characteristics are actually pretty reasonable surrogate markers for recognising a good CEO.
Now, it’s time to add another person to the list of high-quality CEOs. I don’t know much about this person, so I could be wrong, but Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com really does seem to possess my surrogate markers that indicate he should be a pretty good CEO. A recent quote from Marc exemplifies this nicely - it really made me laugh. When speaking about the threat of Microsoft to Salesforce.com’s position in the “on demand Enterprise software” market, he said:
Microsoft promises to do for “on-demand” what Zune has done for media players!
That’s not something a “painting by numbers”, so-called “professional” CEO would be terribly likely to say…
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