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The interesting thing about this is that it boils down to sales. The CEO sells/evangelizes a vision internally and externally. The sell the idea of working at

The interesting thing about this is that it boils down to sales. The CEO sells/evangelizes a vision internally and externally. The sell the idea of working at the company (recruiting). Early they sell the dream to investors and the earliest revenue deals (whatever they are). Later, their sales efforts might be limited to bigger deals/partnerships and recruiting other leaders for their company. I wonder how many founders on Hacker News (who are aimed at big growth) want to be this type of CEO. And I wonder if there are any other types of CEOs at the top. I've never met any.

staunch 16y ago
You're looking at it through your own prism. Selling is just a prerequisite (along with multiple other skills), it's not the most important part of being a good CEO. Discovering the right strategy/vision of the company is not a sales job. Communicating it to people is though. Choosing the right people to hire isn't sales either. Convincing them to join is though. I think it's very harmful to boil down the role of a CEO to merely salesmanship. There's so much more that matters at least as much. Thought experiment: Where would Steve Jobs be now if all he had was his master salesmanship, but none of his design and product skills?
- webwright 16y ago
  Your examples illustrate my point (which was not that being a CEO is MERELY salesmanship, but that it-- in terms of time spent-- is mostly salesmanship.) Of course it'd be silly to say that it's merely salesmanship. If I had a crappy vision and I was an epic salesman, I'd be a pretty lousy CEO, right? In all of those tasks, how much of your time are you spending selling? Discover/find your vision, spend the rest of your career selling it. Deciding who you want to hire and the persuasive dance (where you have to persuade them that working at your company is a good idea AND sell them your vision to boot!) takes a lot more time. Steve Jobs is a great example. As product-focused as he is, what % of the time do you think he spends tinkering or wireframing? I'd wager he's selling/reinforcing ideas for most of his day. Steve Jobs is different because he spends 99% of his sales time selling vision/product ideas versus all of the other types of persuasion he could engage in. Oh, and because his ideas are unusually good. ;-) edit: I'd add two things. Once, I've run 2 different companies for about 70% of my 13 year tech career and two: I really don't enjoy sales as much as I enjoy other work tasks. So if I am looking at it through my prism, it's the prism of my experience.
  - staunch 16y ago
    You don't discover your vision in a month and then spend years selling it. You spend years discovering what your idea should be, refining the idea, making the idea happen, and selling it. Selling is just a single component. If you had to single anyone of them out it would be "making the idea happen" and most of that is not selling, it's a thousand concrete decisions and problems to overcome about the product and marketing. Hiring is even less about salesmanship. Convincing someone to join (or not) takes weeks at most. Finding the right people and making them effective takes months or years. I think outsiders probably have a very skewed perspective on Steve Jobs and most other CEOs because we only see them when they're selling. To outsiders it looks like 100% of their time is spent selling, so it's natural that people think that's primarily what they do. What you don't see is how Jobs is spending his time during the 364 days before a Stevenote.

staunch 16y ago

You're looking at it through your own prism. Selling is just a prerequisite (along with multiple other skills), it's not the most important part of being a good CEO. Discovering the right strategy/vision of the company is not a sales job. Communicating it to people is though. Choosing the right people to hire isn't sales either. Convincing them to join is though. I think it's very harmful to boil down the role of a CEO to merely salesmanship. There's so much more that matters at least as much. Thought experiment: Where would Steve Jobs be now if all he had was his master salesmanship, but none of his design and product skills?

webwright 16y ago
Your examples illustrate my point (which was not that being a CEO is MERELY salesmanship, but that it-- in terms of time spent-- is mostly salesmanship.) Of course it'd be silly to say that it's merely salesmanship. If I had a crappy vision and I was an epic salesman, I'd be a pretty lousy CEO, right? In all of those tasks, how much of your time are you spending selling? Discover/find your vision, spend the rest of your career selling it. Deciding who you want to hire and the persuasive dance (where you have to persuade them that working at your company is a good idea AND sell them your vision to boot!) takes a lot more time. Steve Jobs is a great example. As product-focused as he is, what % of the time do you think he spends tinkering or wireframing? I'd wager he's selling/reinforcing ideas for most of his day. Steve Jobs is different because he spends 99% of his sales time selling vision/product ideas versus all of the other types of persuasion he could engage in. Oh, and because his ideas are unusually good. ;-) edit: I'd add two things. Once, I've run 2 different companies for about 70% of my 13 year tech career and two: I really don't enjoy sales as much as I enjoy other work tasks. So if I am looking at it through my prism, it's the prism of my experience.
- staunch 16y ago
  You don't discover your vision in a month and then spend years selling it. You spend years discovering what your idea should be, refining the idea, making the idea happen, and selling it. Selling is just a single component. If you had to single anyone of them out it would be "making the idea happen" and most of that is not selling, it's a thousand concrete decisions and problems to overcome about the product and marketing. Hiring is even less about salesmanship. Convincing someone to join (or not) takes weeks at most. Finding the right people and making them effective takes months or years. I think outsiders probably have a very skewed perspective on Steve Jobs and most other CEOs because we only see them when they're selling. To outsiders it looks like 100% of their time is spent selling, so it's natural that people think that's primarily what they do. What you don't see is how Jobs is spending his time during the 364 days before a Stevenote.