Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

The New Role of the Modern COO | Nick Dinsmoor

12 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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1:00

A short interview excerpt (speaker A) discussing how the COO role has evolved: historically more rigid and role-defined, the COO was responsible for translating a visionary CEO's ideas into operations and preventing chaos. Today the role is more agile and broad (a 'jack of all things'), while the CEO must also play a critical role in driving curiosity, education, and bringing new ideas into the organization rather than blocking them.

Chapters

The COO role for me was he is a visionary and he has, he has a lot of big ideas and a lot of creative ideas. And I think the challenge is without a COO that can quickly derail into chaos. So that's what it was. And I think the evolution to what a COO role is now is I think there was more division back in the day of like, this is. This is what you do. This is what I do. A COO in today's world, in my view, it's always been a little bit of the Jack of all things, but I think the CEO role now has a much more critical position position because not only does it have to still thrive in organizational knowledge and structure, but it also to me has to be the key player in driving curiosity and education and understanding what's new to bring that into the organization and not be the roadblock. Right. And so I think before it became, it was such a more rigid role, and now I think there's more agility in the role, which I think is a great.