171–180 of 188 posts
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I think you're forgetting the most important reason: - The board members and CEOs are all part of the same club and is looking out for each other.
Yes, networks are beneficial in attaining any job, but the caricature you posit is a farce
> This focus has a devastating impact on the lives of CEOs... Leaders deserve to be happy too... solving the problems starts with communication... we need to wage war on this picture A whole article about how hard CEOs have it, and not a single mention of CEO pay or the ongoing efforts to even get reporting of CEO pay ratios? I mean I agree that CEOs get a ridiculous amount of stress and an unfair share of credit and…
> I'd start by paying CEOs less. I would say that it's a good thing that you're not king then... And no, the stress of C level jobs does not compare to the mean like you would have it.
I am a C-level in my own company. It has been wildly stressful. But it's also more fulfilling than any other job I've had because it's mine, I do overtime to fix my mistakes and not other people's mistakes.
The main reason that CEOs have extra stress and get extra blame and get looked at to solve everything is because CEOs as a group have negotiated their compensation and sold themselves as bringing 350x more value to a company than the average employee. If you do that, you're going to get called upon to prove it at some point.
The undue stress is literally caused by the undue compensation, they go hand in hand. If you want to reduce one, you have to reduce the other.
FWIW, I never said C level jobs compare to the mean stress wise, and I even stated that I agree CEOs suffer ridiculous amounts of stress. I pointed out that more of the population suffers insomnia than CEOs according to the article. That's funny; the article was trying to make it sound like CEOs have disproportionate amounts of insomnia, but it turns out the actual numbers for the population are higher than the numbers the article states for CEOs. If you'd care to disagree with that, feel free to cite a source. Here's mine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978319/
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MSFT Market cap when Ballmer took over: $601B MSFT Market cap when Ballmer announced he was leaving: $270B That was the problem... even if the initial valuation was ridiculously inflated by the early tech bubble, post-crash, the stock was pretty stagnant throughout his tenure as CEO. http://fortune.com/2013/08/23/steve-ballmers-market-cap-prob...
Balmer became the CEO right at the peak of the tech bubble. He couldn't (nobody could) possibly have maintained that sort of valuation. It was all hype and irrational exuberance.
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> I'd start by paying CEOs less. I would say that it's a good thing that you're not king then... And no, the stress of C level jobs does not compare to the mean like you would have it.
Care to elaborate at all? I am a C-level in my own company. It has been wildly stressful. But it's also more fulfilling than any other job I've had because it's mine, I do overtime to fix my mistakes and not other people's mistakes. The main reason that CEOs have extra stress and get extra blame and get looked at to solve everything is because CEOs as a group have negotiated their compensation and sold themselves as…
I think we have a faulty premise at play (or just a disagreement.)
> The main reason that CEOs have extra stress and get extra blame and get looked at to solve everything
Is because they are CEOs. The buck stops with them.
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How about this, tell me if it works for you or not; A path is sequence of correlated activities that lead to a particular goal or deliverable. A choice can increase or decrease the total number of goals or deliverables. A decision can increase or decrease the success chances of a pre-existing goal or deliverable. Generally a startup CEO has one deliverable, the product. And all of their actions are decisions on how t…
Your theory doesn't explain why so many CEOs are either neutral or spectacularly harmful to the long-term health of the companies they manage. I think the distinction between choices and decisions is arbitrary. The real difference is that startups have to keep customers and/or initial investors happy. They're also more likely - on a scale of "absolutely very much" to "I suppose I should care, I guess" - to take an in…
I certainly agree that Enterprise CEOs do have to be doing a good job in the view of the board, exactly like any employee has to do a good job in view of their supervisor if they wish to retain their job. The board can fire them. But that also raises the question of how much is the continued presence of a 'bad CEO' the Board's fault.
And I don't agree at all with this statement The problem for enterprise CEOs is that there are painful, obvious conflicts between Wall Street's persistent demand for high quarterly returns, the on-the-ground demands of keeping a business healthy and growing, and the value of their own personal stake in the company.
If the stock price is a proxy for the health of the company and the CEO is in charge of keeping the company healthy, then the stock price and the CEO are aligned. I've only really been on 1:1 speaking terms with two enterprise CEOs, Scott McNealy (Sun) and Dan Warmenhoven (NetApp). And neither of them was 'conflicted' about what Wall Street 'demanding' high quarterly returns, nor did the noise of traders on Wall Street enter into their business decisions as far as I could ascertain. When decisions were made and communicated they are very solid reasoning behind them around how the choice would improve the company. I have also seen startup CEOs that made extraordinarily bad decisions that benefited themselves personally at the expense of the company, both Zynga and Groupon showed how painful that could be. But when you look across the millions of companies, just in the US, it is hard to find a persistent, or even prevalent, pattern of CEOs who put themselves or by proxy the stock price, ahead of the company issues. I am certainly open to evidence that this is the case, I just haven't seen it.
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I'm guessing you aren't conversant with how taxation and class mobility have changed over the last 40 years. Let me save you the suspense: you're wrong.
Taxes went up, class mobility went down.
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Your theory doesn't explain why so many CEOs are either neutral or spectacularly harmful to the long-term health of the companies they manage. I think the distinction between choices and decisions is arbitrary. The real difference is that startups have to keep customers and/or initial investors happy. They're also more likely - on a scale of "absolutely very much" to "I suppose I should care, I guess" - to take an in…
Can you characterize 'so many' a bit more objectively or quantitatively? I can certainly point to a few CEOs I felt are neutral or harmful to their companies but I don't have any data to suggest that this is any more than the typical left edge of the bell curve kind of thing. If you have any good studies on this I'd love to read them. I certainly agree that Enterprise CEOs do have to be doing a good job in the view o…
If a small department has a great set of low-risk, high-reward projects, but runs out of budget, the company should run the project so long as the risk-adjusted reward is greater than the cost of capital. But instead, they must stick to the plan.
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I think you're forgetting the most important reason: - The board members and CEOs are all part of the same club and is looking out for each other.
Yes, networks are beneficial in attaining any job, but the caricature you posit is a farce
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to elaborate at all? I am a C-level in my own company. It has been wildly stressful. But it's also more fulfilling than any other job I've had because it's mine, I do overtime to fix my mistakes and not other people's mistakes. The main reason that CEOs have extra stress and get extra blame and get looked at to solve everything is because CEOs as a group have negotiated their compensation and sold themselves as…
As you saw I didn't say anything about insomnia. That was lazy reporting. I think we have a faulty premise at play (or just a disagreement.) > The main reason that CEOs have extra stress and get extra blame and get looked at to solve everything Is because they are CEOs. The buck stops with them.
That wasn't lazy reporting, the article made an intentional and consistent series of assertions intended to paint the CEOs life as unduly difficult compared to other people, insomnia is a conscious part of that narrative.
What is lazy reporting, in my opinion, is completely ignoring the issue of CEO compensation. Even if you agree with current CEO compensation trends, it still needs to be addressed. If you get paid more, you should expect to stress more. If not, then why not? Why should someone making 1M not expect 10x more stress than someone making 100k? There may be reasons, but you should articulate them if you want to be taken seriously.
EDIT: scratch that, my writing is lazy. :P I speculate that ignoring compensation was also intentional, not lazy.
> Is because they are CEOs. The buck stops with them.
Then a commensurate amount of stress comes with the job, does it not? Your point here opposes what the article says, that a company is a team effort and not an individual contribution. So I don't understand, what are you arguing for? You want to have CEOs continue to take ultimate responsibility, but not have to have as much stress? How? Or you want them to continue averaging 350x the pay of employees and also continue to have more stress? Can you have it both ways? Why?
The effort to get pay ratio reporting of CEOs to be standard - something I alluded to - is something the SEC is currently considering rolling back. Do you believe pay ratio reporting is a reasonable goal? Do you believe that the US average CEO pay ratios are trending in the right direction?