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The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
- Aeolun 5y agoSo? They’re saying that people that became CEO within 10 years literally had opportunitie thrown to them?
- AdrianB1 5y agoNot necessarily thrown to them, but sometimes they were looking for. The "study" does not tell how to become THE CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but how to become "a CEO somewhere". If you want really bad to become a CEO, you can be the CEO of a free falling former big company, like a former director of mine is today: it checks the CEO box, nothing more.
- breakyerself 5y agoKill your boss. Make it look like an accident.
- BossingAround 5y agoRepeat until you're the most viable option.
- WalterBright 5y agoThe fastest way is start your own company and name yourself CEO.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoI’m an astronaut then.
- hef19898 5y agoHey Jeff, didn't know you were on HN!
- golemotron 5y agoSo funny that they didn't mention that option.
- bserge 5y agoHa, my first thought. And actually what I did when I formed my first company. I had two plastic cards designed, one for me as "CEO" and another as a press pass with me as "Chief Editor", which actually got me into some expos! Blogs were new and people didn't know how to treat these "online magazines" and "journalists". I even had people from big newspapers contact me with requests to use my online comments in their articles. Good times. So embarrassing to remember, but I had a lot of fun. Biggest mistake ever was to not find partners asap.
- adminscoffee 5y agoi like your style. i use to do this at festivals. i would jump up on stage behind any band and pretend to be with the band. it worked. the following year i realized i could make an online magazine and become press, so i did and the next year i got in half price, press pass, and a table. wild ride
- the_only_law 5y agoProbably even easier than that since it seems like half the people getting involved in MLM scheme suddenly title themselves CEO.
- onion2k 5y agoSomething that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. Wanting to run a small company is largely about personal freedom that comes for not having a boss, but wanting to be the head of a large business is a whole different ballgame. It's a role that encompasses strategy, leadership, and management - 3 things that can only really be done by talking to people and understanding them. It's a very different role to writing code. Most developers who enjoy writing code run away from meetings given the slightest opportunity, yet they also covet a job that's 90% about having meetings. For a very long time that was my own journey. I got up to CTO level for a while. Then I realized I just don't enjoy it, so now I'm a senior engineer again. Wanting to be a CEO takes a very specific mindset.
- jstummbillig 5y ago> Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. I am surprised at how few of them do, considering how low the barriers of entry to company making in tech are (compared to other industries with heavy requirements in space, equipment, expertise and regulations) So I am also surprised at your experience. Most devs I know just wanna code.
- anyfactor 5y agoI don't believe there is anyone out there who just likes to sell. It is an incredibly volatile way to make a consistent living. Specially asking them to believe that only you believe in. We all know that developer who wanted to start their own startup/product but felt into hard times and so to keep the lights running they started to do consultancy/freelancing on the side. Then consultancy became their main thing and the startup was sent to the back burner or they just quit the venture entirely.
- mk89 5y ago> So I am also surprised at your experience. Most devs I know just wanna code. Same here. Never heard of any developer wanting to be CEO of a big company. Typically startup, yes, but that's mostly for "independence" and doing something cool, faster, etc.
- eloeffler 5y ago> Sprinters don’t accelerate to the top by acquiring the perfect pedigree. They do it by making bold career moves over the course of their career that catapult them to the top. This article looks like yet another one that screams for a survivorship bias disclaimer: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
- ngc248 5y agoHaha yeah, the ones how end up on top always think they made bold moves, while the others didn't. It is exactly as you said, survivor bias and nothing else.
- AmericanChopper 5y agoAny study of successful people (or really successful anything, according to any criteria you choose for “success”) can be dismissed as a “survivorship bias”. But it’s quite baseless to presume that no insight can be gained by studying them. What type of bias is it when you just invent an explanation for something out of thin air?
- dredmorbius 5y agoThe problem is the sampling. If you select a sample of observations matching your criteria, and then do a factors analysis of them, you're effectively committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (another way of describing survivorship bias). If instead you were to randomly select from a cohort of individuals and track their career trajectories, then you'd be looking at what factors contribute most to success. I suspect the latter might be rather more strongly weighted to the generally-recommended career advice of good school + business degree + management-track positions early in career, though of course, that's precisely the hypothesis that you're trying to establish. Point being that there are a lot more people who graduate from the School of Hard Knocks and advance through smaller firms (of which there are far more than there are top-school graduates). Then you get to address questions such as whether or not school actually is determinative in careers, or is merely selecting for those destined to succeed regardless. (There was an interesting incidental study done based on NYC magnet school examination cutoffs, which are quite arbitrary, and for which there's significant evidence that those at least immediately bordering the selection criteria (and possibly more broadly) have roughly equivalent career / earnings trajectories). Among the few interesting elements in the HBS "study" is the possible role of high-risk gambles in career advancement. That also ultimately points to survivorship bias (it excludes those who took such gambles and lost), though there's the prospect of multiple-iteration games as well. So long as the upside gain (CEO-track) is high, and the downside loss (failed that advancement attempt, but no penalty) is low, there's little harm in making such attempts. If, however, failed attempts are read as a flag against future consideration, the calculus changes remarkably. This is typical of many "up or out" advancement policies.
- baybal2 5y agoI knew a man who turned a CFO of Bank of America not so well known Japanese venture at around 30 when the previous CFO died on the job, and a dozen people above him declined the job.
- gyulai 5y agoI don't see anything much that's non-obvious here. - Go small to go big = It's easier to be CEO in a smaller company. Kind of obvious. - Inherit a Big Mess = It's easier to be CEO in a situation where nobody wants to be CEO. Kind of obvious, too. - Make a big leap = Take risky bets, in which case you're not represented in the sample of CEOs when they don't play out.
- shapefrog 5y agoThe non-obvious thing was that the author walks blindly into every single survivorship bias there is and then draws a definitive conclusion based on them.
- WouterZ 5y agoMy thinking as well... They reverse engineer CEO's trackrecords... Good thing all these CEO's are blissfully unaware of their relative luck and build upon their own ability to fix anything.
- atq2119 5y agoNothing is ever non-obvious in hindsight in the social sciences ;) That said, I like that one way this can be read is that being a C-level executive is typically not about some inherent skill or talent. Instead, people simply grow into the role when given (and taking) the chance. This has implications on what a just level of compensation would be.
- tomp 5y agoYou're misinterpreting the article. The "go small to go big" thing isn't about being a CEO of a small company. It's about taking over a small project, growing it successfully, then using that experience & reference to launch yourself into the CEO position of a large company.
- yosito 5y agoI was always a natural leader up until graduating from college. Had plenty of volunteer leadership roles, but never any roles officially employed as a manager. Then after graduating, I suddenly found I could make far more money as an individual software enginneer than my peers were making in management roles at local companies, so I've been chasing the money for the last decade. But it feels like a bit of a dead end in terms of career accomplishments, and I'd like to shift back into leadership roles, but after a decade of structured roles writing instructions for machines, the relatively unfixed day-to-day responsibilities of management, and strategic thinking about people and more "squishy" things than computers, feels foreign to me. I don't know how to change my mindset back to that.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoIm transitioning from coding to the squishy stuff, it’s a long hard road. I’m taking one step at a time, my boss being a mentor, giving me responsibilities gradually. The really hard part is that there is a clear success/fail result from running code. The success of an interaction with a client ranges throughout a whole bunch of greys. And without experience your evaluation might be off by 100%.
- xelxebar 5y agoWhat about the losers? Please fill in this table first, then we can talk about the whys and hows: | # sprinters | # non-sprinters | --------+----------------+-----------------+ CEO | | | --------+----------------|-----------------| non-CEO | | | --------+----------------+-----------------+ The "CEO Genome Project" home page looks just like promotion for a book. I guess you have to buy it before judging whether it offers any value.
- alanlammiman 5y agoexactly. this is so basic, it's staggering that the article doesn't cover it. I realise hbr isn't a peer reviewed journal, but it's pretty disgraceful that a publication that carries the name of what is claimed to be the top university in the world peddles research that, whatever merits it may have, disingenuously uses a flawed argument like that. And unfortunately this isn't even the worst of its kind in HBR...
- elzbardico 5y agoI don’t think it is surprising that HBR publishes this kind of article. On the contrary this is exactly why we can trace most of the organizational problems and a lot of societal ones to the ideology factory called Harvard Business School.
- nojito 5y agoYou don’t need to study non-ceos if you are trying to understand what a ceo is.
- ickelbawd 5y agoThat’s not true. If you only look at CEOs you won’t be able to tell which behaviors are unique to CEOs and which are not. If you don’t eliminate these potentially universal traits and behaviors you’re setting yourself up to be be wrong due to biased data. More generally: how can you possibly understand what something is without understanding also what it is not?
- krak12 5y agoBeing the son of the founder or the previous ceo helps to become a ceo quickly.
- aomobile 5y agoThe “i regret becoming a manager” theme gets repeated often and I don’t know about you guys but I go to work for the money, plain and simple. Sure coding is pleasurable (I’d do it for free as a hobby anyway) but if being ceo pays many times more, I’d just go for that if possible. Seems almost unreasonable not to desire that job over a coding position..
- smorgusofborg 5y agoI'm curious how to deal with the social pretenses in hiring? I.e. do you express this view in a developer interview or do you keep it contained to the low end of where you want to be in 5 years being similar to a motivated developer? I'd also point out that money is in exchange for something. I would much rather be in a low stress job that pays enough than having more money than I have time to use, ulcers and permanent negative health and behavioral factors that will follow me into retirement..
- avereveard 5y agoI wish there were more details to the claim, because my hunch is that most people regret becoming middle-management, squeezed between whom holds the budget and whom does the work, unable to affect neither but responsible toward both. Of course that line of work sucks!
- mjburgess 5y agoWell, have you done both? Do you actually go to work for the money? Or is it more that given your work is broadly fun (, easy for you, etc.) -- that then you focus on money? What do you think would happen if the work was more challenging than you could manage, wasn't fun, etc. -- would the money then appear as sufficient?
- mrgreenfur 5y agoHaving a senior leadership position in “late 20s” sure seems like privilege and connections to me. Who cares about “sprints” when your family has all the benefits and the executive positions are the default.
- karxxm 5y agoI would like to become a CEO, a TLDR of this text would help me here :)
- mettamage 5y agoYes, there may be survivorship bias. But I also think there is no “safe fast way” to become a CEO. When I look at traders and investors, I see the same thing. Most of them are a result of being very lucky and aggressive. Only a few of them actually did it without much luck (e.g. Simmons).
- verisimi 5y ago#1 Parent was a CEO.
- elzbardico 5y agoCome from a rich, influential family. Be white. Be male. Be ruthless. Come from an Ivy League institution. If you have trouble being accepted into it, remember that if George bush could get into Yale, every other prick like you have a chance too. Have no morals. Despise the working class and fuck them thoroughly every chance you have to show the pricks in Wall Street you are one of them. Be a sweet talker.
- atonse 5y agoEh did you even read the article? It literally says the opposite. It says having an elite background does NOT correlate strongly with these sprinters. A lot of it (one of their examples was a woman) is being able to take tough or risky challenges and rise through them.
- honkdaddy 5y agoThe CEOs of Google and Apple, two of the most powerful companies in the world, have backgrounds entirely diametric to your advice.
- tamade 5y ago2 out of 17k? that's reassuring!
- tamade 5y agoCurious what % of their 2.6k and 17k datasets were white males
- tamade 5y ago"They do it by making bold career moves over the course of their career that catapult them to the top." "bold career moves", i.e., right place at the right time, a.k.a., dumb luck
- jaybrendansmith 5y agoYup. Survivorship bias. For every one of those there are 10 who were in a) The wrong industry, b) The wrong business model, c) The wrong product, d) The wrong collaborators (you know, the ones that cannot be easily removed even if you wanted to.) So much luck involved. I equate it to bands, for every Beatles there are 100s of unsuccessful solo artists who started out every bit as talented as Paul & John. Eventually the really good ones do make it I think, but not the way they expected, and not as one of these CEO sprinters.