There’s something you’d probably need to describe in terms of “risk” if you were to describe it in business school language at all.
..something about owning your own risk-reward. The irrelevance of whether or not a failure/success was yours, bad luck or whatnot. The whys of success aren’t as important to a CEO, at least not outside of his own head. Founders and professionals face totally different incentives, different selection criteria.
Professional managers, are constantly assessed. Their success depends others’ perception of them. Career incentives are intertwined with a system of “winning” regardless of whether a company company wins, in a lot of cases. If a company doesn’t succeed, a professional CEO will probably get another CEOing gig… if the failure doesn’t reflect too badly on him. CEO actions need to be justifiable. Failing despite doing the right thing is always better than the other kind of failure, much better. The Travis Kalkanik failure is a career killer for a professional exec, regardless of successes. The John Scully kind of failure… that’s not even failure.
A founder-CEO typically doesn’t care about that stuff, what the ultimate narrative will be.
Imagine a founder neglects some basic aspect of business. Say HR stuff. No periodic assessments. No employee development… A mess where some people do nothing… Lets say it’s bad, visible consequences.
From a founder’s perspective, this might be meaningless. If we manage to make thingX, we’ll be successful. If not, we’ll fail. That “problem” doesn’t help or hurt my chances much, so I don’t care about it. It’s just mess. Right or wrong, if the CEO doesn’t see The Problem as something standing between here and ThingX, then who cares.
To a professional CEO the same problem represents a massive target on his back. If we fail, I fail. The Problem will be a newspaper headline. The board will hear. The narrative of failure will include “bad CEOing” in a nice, narrative package. Even if we succeed, the stink will still stick to me.
I think this results in more consistent performance, across any metric where performance is consistently measurable.
Consider how this article treats“CEO Performance:”
”a team of professors at the business schools of Duke, Vanderbilt, and Harvard universities finds that founder-run companies to be less productive and more poorly managed”
“..were 9.4% less productive, on average.. consistently lower management scores.. less transparent management practices—nepotistic hiring, et cetera..”
These are the generic assessment criteria of a generic professional CEO, not a founder. They apply to Coca Cola exactly as they apply to Groupon, Stripe or SpaceX. Nowhere in any of that will you find “but he knows how to get to mars” as a criteria.