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.<p>..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.<p>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 <i>always</i> 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.<p>A founder-CEO typically doesn’t care about that stuff, what the ultimate narrative will be.<p>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.<p>From a founder’s perspective, this <i>might</i> 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.<p>To a professional CEO the same problem represents a massive target on his back. If we fail, I fail. <i>The Problem</i> 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.<p>I think this results in more consistent performance, across any metric where performance is consistently measurable.<p>Consider how this article treats“CEO Performance:”<p><i>”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</i>”<p>“<i>..were 9.4% less productive, on average.. consistently lower management scores.. less transparent management practices—nepotistic hiring, et cetera..</i>”<p>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 “<i>but he knows how to get to mars</i>” as a criteria.