A guy I used to work for once described his path to the top of a large company as, "being lazy enough to want to delegate everything, having enough experience in enough fields to know who to delegate to, and being smart enough to know what tasks are worth your time."<p>(That's paraphrased slightly)
Ben in the book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" summed up how one becomes ready to be CEO of an early stage company nicely. You become trained to be a CEO of an early stage company by becoming the CEO of an early stage company.<p>It's not a defined role, its deserved by someone who is capable of pulling off success in business by controlling anarchic situations. It's not like they can teach the skills to do that in school.
Huh. If I were to go off of all the resumes that come across my desk, I would have thought the quickest way to becoming a CEO is to:<p>1) Go to a hacker school like Hack Reactor<p>2) Start a website that takes you ~8 weeks of spare time to build<p>3) Call yourself CEO of that website and ask for $180k salary!
The more interesting question is how to become a <i>successful</i> CEO. One thing I have noticed is that good CEOs can frame important problems in a way that allow other people (ideally good ones that the CEO hired) to solve them.
On the interactive chart- why does the likelihood of BECOMING a CEO go UP with greater experience? Wouldn't it go down over time, as in, if you haven't made CEO yet you never will?
As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a good candidate for such a public company.
1. Be born to the right family.<p>2. Be asshole enough to manipulate people working for you and get credit for their work.<p>3. Be a good actor and convince others that you really know what you are doing.<p>4. Be smart enough to not get into details.
This is based on a survey of Management Consultants. For those who have not worked with Management Consultants, or seen the Showtime series "House of Lies", these are not the guys you want to be your CEO. (The TV show is fictionalized, of course, but it's based on a book written by a management consultant.)<p>Their characteristics are rapaciousness, self focus, political and emotional manipulation and greed. They do well for themselves, not so well for the company.<p>So, I question the premise of this article from the beginning as its source material is not successful CEOs who spent more than 10 years at the company in question or in the CEO role.<p>Edit: I see I'm being buried. To be fair, there's a difference between a "management consultant" and an consulting engineer. consulting engineers get stuff done. Management consultants can also come up with great ideas (as shown in the show I referenced above) and can legitimately add value. But they are best as consultants, not employees and not CEOs. Of course generalizations are false if applied strictly- there are exceptions.<p>I just think that a better survey of successful CEOs would be necessary to draw any serious conclusions.<p>AND - more specifically- having worked with management consultants and a variety of CEOs of startups who didn't have startup backgrounds, for a startup you generally don't want a management consultant as your founding CEO.