I've always looked at the CEO position as something that is very hard to find someone to carry out. Anyone clown can do a startup with a little website and talk about getting traction. Bit few can actually deal with the demands of being the CEO. The position is what sets the tone of the company and its culture. Rotten people create rotten cultures. If I ever was in a position to be a real CEO ( from a successful company), I would really invest in learning about people, how they work better, and how to give them good tools so they can do their jobs. Not in fancy planes, or luxurious offices. I despise those things. Guess that my take on the CEO is that he/she has to be in a servant type of position rather than that of a dictator.
Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#22I think this is a very good list, and I'm very surprised at the negative reaction it's getting here. The habits in this list are all signs that an executive is making decisions, not rationally, but out of hubris. I'm amazed that people can't see that this is a problem.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#23All corporate biographies are written by people who know the end of the story and now have to retrofit some facts and omit the others to backfill the story so that it seems like a straight line leading to success/failure. I present to you a set of quick templates for writing business advice where you know how the story turned out. ----------------- CEO failed: They see themselves and their companies as dominating the…
The difference between crazy and genius is sometimes just the final outcome.
What to do when the outcome is mostly determined by luck?
These books and articles are just cloudspotting. They see a bunny rabbit, I see a lucky skunk.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#24All corporate biographies are written by people who know the end of the story and now have to retrofit some facts and omit the others to backfill the story so that it seems like a straight line leading to success/failure. I present to you a set of quick templates for writing business advice where you know how the story turned out. ----------------- CEO failed: They see themselves and their companies as dominating the…
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Imagine the things that would have been said about Steve Jobs if he had failed to bring Apple back to prominence
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#25To all the people saying "These are all Steve Jobs's traits":
Steve Jobs was an asshole and would have got nowhere if he hadn't met Wozniak.
When Jobs set out on his own, he got the flaming defeat that was Next Computer.
Maybe his traits should be seen as negative, but he was lucky other talent at Apple could compensate for them.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#26All corporate biographies are written by people who know the end of the story and now have to retrofit some facts and omit the others to backfill the story so that it seems like a straight line leading to success/failure. I present to you a set of quick templates for writing business advice where you know how the story turned out. ----------------- CEO failed: They see themselves and their companies as dominating the…
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Imagine the things that would have been said about Steve Jobs if he had failed to bring Apple back to prominence
[deleted]
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#27I think this is a very good list, and I'm very surprised at the negative reaction it's getting here. The habits in this list are all signs that an executive is making decisions, not rationally, but out of hubris. I'm amazed that people can't see that this is a problem.
"The habits in this list are all signs that an executive is making decisions, not rationally, but out of hubris."
How do you know that?
Just in case it isn't obivious: What most people here seem to be saying is that what you're (and the article is) saying has not been shown by any stretch. Do you have any data and credible research to back it up?
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because a sample consists of 50 companies and 200 interviews hardly makes that a sound sample, given no information about how those companies were selected, and given no attempt to compare those companies to successful companies. For example, 5/7 of these traits easily describe Steve Jobs. Furthermore, just because someone is an academic authority hardly makes them less liable to fall for the cognitive biases th…
I suppose I should have been more verbose above. Basically, I don't want to say that davidkatz's and yours notes about the possible errors and biases of the study are unfounded. IMO, every study or report should be approached with these precautions in mind, if simply because all data has to be interpretted at some point which makes it subjective. But the main point I was trying to get across is that a study of this s…
I'm sorry to say that I've had personal conversations with faculty researchers in diverse fields that gave me the distinct impression that these people really should not be doing research. It's very easy to go through the 'form' of good research. Interview a lot of people, look at a lot of data, but that's no guarantee for good research.
When someone says: 'here are 7 habits of unsuccessful CEOs' and does not even attempt to account for the problem of 'how do we know it's really these habits that caused the company to fail?', but rather just flat out assumes it in the face of decades of findings that suggest that this is an easy trap to fall into, I for one can't take them seriously, and academic credentials have almost nothing to do with it.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#29Seriously? How many more decades are we going to see people mistake correlation for causation as if this problem had not been thoroughly understood? This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact. Kahneman and other psychologists have long established that we color character traits into stories that fit the result. If a CEO is pursuing his beliefs strongly and the company succeeds, we call him a visio…
I think the issue is journalism vs scientific reasearch. In journalism, you do not have the luxury of spending huge quantities of time developing your methadology and validating your statistics; and it is understood that journalism is much more by-the-gut than science. One of the major jobs of journalism is to help your reader draw connections and get context for current issues. As long as readers get a diversity of…
Journalists have a responsibility towards facts that is just as strong as a scientist's responsibility towards facts. The major difference is that journalists are not necessarily expected to discover facts, but report on them, which greatly shifts their scope of attention.
Helping readers draw connections and get context is valuable, but only if it's done within the facts. A journalist or a publication that reports something that is factually wrong has to loose credibility.
Reporting something as fact when it is merely speculation is a milder form of reporting something that's factually wrong, but it's almost as deserving of our criticism.