Simon Sinek argues that the title 'CEO' is poorly defined and causes organizations to place operationally-minded leaders into visionary roles. He proposes renaming the role to 'Chief Vision Officer' (CVO) to emphasize ownership of company vision, contrasts visionary vs. operator responses to problems (pivot vs. cost-cutting), and illustrates recurring failures when COOs/CFOs replace founders using examples from Starbucks, Dell, and Walmart.
Chapters
So I don't like the term CEO.
In every other C level executive title. Their job is in their title. Cfo, cmo, coo, cto. Like we know exactly what you do. If you don't know how to work a DVD player, we don't make you the cto. If you can't read a balance sheet, we don't make you the cfo. I know that. I don't even have to look at your cv. It's in the damn title. What's a CEO? What exactly is the responsibility of an executive officer? It's a very ill defined title and so we put a lot of people who are not qualified for that job in that position. I think we need to change the title to cvo, Chief Vision Officer. Someone who's in charge of setting and ensuring that the company stays.
On the path of the vision. Somebody has to own the vision and very often the COO or the cfo, which are head down operator. More finite minded jobs tend to see themselves as in line for the next, for the big job. And it's incorrect. It's not 1 and 2, it's 1 and A. They're complementary skill sets, visionary and operator that have to work in concert together. And so we see a very, very common mistake.
Where a visionary founder will promote their CFO or COO to take over from them. And we see it all the time.
Howard Schultz left Starbucks, put his COO in Starbucks went like this. Howard Schultz had to come back. Mike Dell put his COO in Dell, went like this. Mike Dell had to come back. We saw.
Mike Duke take over Walmart.
Set the company on a horrible path. Now Doug McMillan, who's more infinite minded, is putting the company back. We see this repeating pattern and the problem is because the relationship between those complementary skill sets, it happened with Steve Jobs. You take a visionary founder and you say, who should we replace you with? And they say the same thing. You have to put my COO or my CFO in my job. Because I trust them more than anybody. True. I couldn't have done it without them. True. They know more about the workings of the company than I do. True. Except it's the wrong skill set.
And so what we do is we put operators in visionary jobs. We put people who've built a skill set. That doesn't mean an operator can't be more infinite minded. But because we haven't set up that they have to completely change the way they lead for what they've been doing for 20 or 30 years, they're going to do the thing that made them successful, which is look down.
You know, a company has a bad year, what does an operator do? Cost cut, cut costs. Company has a bad year, what does a visionary do? Pivot, reinvent, reinvest.
