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The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

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Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#21

Post by WouterZ »

shapefrog wrote: post #17
gyulai wrote: post #8

I don't see anything much that's non-obvious here. - Go small to go big = It's easier to be CEO in a smaller company. Kind of obvious. - Inherit a Big Mess = It's easier to be CEO in a situation where nobody wants to be CEO. Kind of obvious, too. - Make a big leap = Take risky bets, in which case you're not represented in the sample of CEOs when they don't play out.

The non-obvious thing was that the author walks blindly into every single survivorship bias there is and then draws a definitive conclusion based on them.

My thinking as well...

They reverse engineer CEO's trackrecords... Good thing all these CEO's are blissfully unaware of their relative luck and build upon their own ability to fix anything.

Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#22

Post by faeyanpiraat »

Aeolun wrote: post #18
onion2k wrote: post #4

Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. Wanting to run a small company is largely about personal freedom that comes for not having a boss, but wanting to be the head of a large business is a whole different ballgame. It's a role that encompasses strategy, leadership, and management - 3 things that can only really be done by talking to people and under…

I don’t covet the role. I just feel I’d be marginally better than others that suck at it.

There was a study about some skill, and like 80% of people thought they are better than average.

Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#24

Post by faeyanpiraat »

yosito wrote: post #10

I was always a natural leader up until graduating from college. Had plenty of volunteer leadership roles, but never any roles officially employed as a manager. Then after graduating, I suddenly found I could make far more money as an individual software enginneer than my peers were making in management roles at local companies, so I've been chasing the money for the last decade. But it feels like a bit of a dead end…

Im transitioning from coding to the squishy stuff, it’s a long hard road.

I’m taking one step at a time, my boss being a mentor, giving me responsibilities gradually.

The really hard part is that there is a clear success/fail result from running code.

The success of an interaction with a client ranges throughout a whole bunch of greys. And without experience your evaluation might be off by 100%.

Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#25

Post by mgh2 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #19
AmericanChopper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any study of successful people (or really successful anything, according to any criteria you choose for “success”) can be dismissed as a “survivorship bias”. But it’s quite baseless to presume that no insight can be gained by studying them. What type of bias is it when you just invent an explanation for something out of thin air?

The problem is the sampling. If you select a sample of observations matching your criteria, and then do a factors analysis of them, you're effectively committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (another way of describing survivorship bias). If instead you were to randomly select from a cohort of individuals and track their career trajectories, then you'd be looking at what factors contribute most to success. I suspect…

From the book promoted in the article: The CEO next door (p. 22)

"With a ‘Moneyball’ approach to leadership..." review

Sampling/methodology

"One of the reasons for this (stereotypical CEO/survivor bias) is that we tend to limit our thinking to the companies and leaders that regularly appear in mass media. This view—typically focused on Fortune 500 companies—is very narrow. It is also very shallow: we know little about these leaders beyond their seemingly perfect public bios. We tend to ignore the vast universe of companies of all sizes. If you broaden the lens beyond the Fortune 500, there are, for example, over two million companies with more than five employees in the United States alone.5 This means over two million CEOs: a broad, rich set of leadership experiences that don’t often get talked about in the press."

Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#26

Post by jollybean »

onion2k wrote: post #4

Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. Wanting to run a small company is largely about personal freedom that comes for not having a boss, but wanting to be the head of a large business is a whole different ballgame. It's a role that encompasses strategy, leadership, and management - 3 things that can only really be done by talking to people and under…

There are just as many headaches in running a small company and frankly it's overly romanticized by so many people.

There is no such thing as 'not having a boss' unless you live in a cabin in the woods, independent of the world.

Either you work for a corp. with a manager, with what are frankly relatively clear functions - or - you work for the whims of the market and or consulting customers (and possibly a board and investors) in which case you adopt an utterly different tone and there's no expectations of clarity or consistency and you're always on your heels.

I don't think people have an internal conception for how that 'stability, clarity and peace of mind' that they seek is actually a total luxury, something which all those people working out there struggle and toil to create. Like a little cottage on the ocean that doesn't move with the big waves, it's a fabrication, something constructed, not a 'simpler escape' detached from the system.

Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#28

Post by hef19898 »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #13
onion2k wrote: post #4

Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. Wanting to run a small company is largely about personal freedom that comes for not having a boss, but wanting to be the head of a large business is a whole different ballgame. It's a role that encompasses strategy, leadership, and management - 3 things that can only really be done by talking to people and under…

"how many developers want to run their own large companies" Think they want to run their own large companies.

I went through a version of that, I wanted my own company, large enough to justify the name and having people doing the work but small enough to be more operational involved as a large corp CEO. Turned out I didn't like running a company, the smallest one imaginable, at all. Now I'm back in employment as a supply chain ops manager, and that is so much more fun! I just have to reign my urge to pursue "large" improvements from time to time. If I can finally do that, that will he the most fun, and chill, job ever.

Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#29

Post by hef19898 »

Aeolun wrote: post #18
onion2k wrote: post #4

Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. Wanting to run a small company is largely about personal freedom that comes for not having a boss, but wanting to be the head of a large business is a whole different ballgame. It's a role that encompasses strategy, leadership, and management - 3 things that can only really be done by talking to people and under…

I don’t covet the role. I just feel I’d be marginally better than others that suck at it.

I know that feeling, I learned the hard way so that having better ideas, and seeing stuff you propose after 2 years kind a proofs that, is different from actually acting upon these ideas when you are in a position of power.

Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)

#30

Post by hef19898 »

jollybean wrote: post #26
onion2k wrote: post #4

Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. Wanting to run a small company is largely about personal freedom that comes for not having a boss, but wanting to be the head of a large business is a whole different ballgame. It's a role that encompasses strategy, leadership, and management - 3 things that can only really be done by talking to people and under…

There are just as many headaches in running a small company and frankly it's overly romanticized by so many people. There is no such thing as 'not having a boss' unless you live in a cabin in the woods, independent of the world. Either you work for a corp. with a manager, with what are frankly relatively clear functions - or - you work for the whims of the market and or consulting customers (and possibly a board and…

I thought not having management and only customers would beat having both, investors are the worst kind of management so IMHO. Turned out that having some layers of management between you and customers / investors is a nice thing to have. Especially if said management isn't completely incompetent.
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