A short talk addressing the challenges CEOs face, especially the shift from having a single boss to answering to a board/committee and the difficulty of prioritizing strategic questions. The speaker highlights that CEOs must run the company, not seek answers from a manager, and raises how to think about competition as a subtle, multifaceted concern (uses an elephant/three-people analogy).
CEO is a funny job, right? Many of us, in some ways, it helps if you founded a company young and you didn't have 15 years of corporate experience working for a boss. Because if you do, if you've spent your time kind of climbing the corporate ladder, one day you're CEO and you don't have a boss anymore, right? It's not a manager employee relationship. Right. First, you're working for a committee, not a person. And second, if you ever went to that committee going, gosh, I wonder what we should do next quarter, they would look at you and say, I think you should help us find a new CEO, right? Because you're supposed to know what we're supposed to do next quarter. Your job is to run the company. So it is not a manager employee relationship. And managing that is difficult. The fourth issue is to what extent should I worry about competition? This is actually, I think, the most subtle question because it evokes a lot of very passionate answers, all of which, to me are partially informed. Reminds me of the story of the three people and the elephant. Person grabbing leg thinks it's a tree. Person grabbing the tail thinks it's a rope. And everyone's very passionate about their conclusion, but they're all only seeing part of the picture.
