Let's not be superfluous. Being a CEO is hard, even the 5 am rising and 'hand shaking' parts.
Yes, a "bad" CEO will be fired, meaning that he will pocket a fat severance package and he will be able to try again in another company with almost no stigma attached.
Even if he did it so badly making himself unhireable for similar positions, he will have already earned more money that most people (even with professional jobs) see in their lifetimes.
"With great power comes great responsibility" seems not to apply to CEOs, more like "the house always wins".
The reason the golden parachutes exist is because CEO is likely going to be 'the end of the career' for most. There are so many reasons to get fired and it will probably happen. After that, there's not much else.
Nobody in their right mind would be a 'Big Co CEO' without some kinds of rewards even on the downside - many of these folks can make quite a lot of money in some other C-level position and do just fine right there. Why put your head on the chopping block?
You might also ask the question why athletes are paid gazillions for doing something fun, that they enjoy that comes with zero responsibility basically, and can often do very well even if they don't perform, although usually that's not the case.
And FYI most CEO's don't make gazillions of dollars, that's just what we see in the news.
on example was the campaign against a former BT CFO would not would print shares to go on a buying spree - like Vodaphone was doing
Much easier than many other jobs, from mining and nursing to jobs that single mothers do in 2 shifts.
And with much more perks, respect, personal influence, and earnings...
Being a CEO doesn't mean you're the boss. It means you serve everyone, from employees to customers to shareholders, and are responsible for every single thing that happens. If someone doesn't do well, it's your fault. And being responsible for others livelihoods with every decision you make is definitely not easy.
Golden parachutes ensure that this responsibility means almost nothing. CEOs have driven whole companies to the ground, losing the jobs of thousands, and got their fat check in the end. Heck, even white collar crime goes largely unpunished.
I am sure the duties are "hard" in an absolute sense, but not relative to pay and accountability, not when compared to other jobs that are hard in an absolute sense, as you point out.
Not necessarily. It completely depends on the company and the industry.
If someone said to me: "you can either work in an Amazon warehouse (either shift 7.00am-5.30pm or 5.45pm-4.15am) or be the CEO of Amazon but you're going to get paid the same whichever you choose" I know which I'd do.
I think you are misinterpreting what 'hard' means.
That makes it volatile, not hard. And the stakes are much less for volatility when you already have several cool million in the bank...
The CEO of an Ambulance company I know has about 500 staff, he's been doing it for 25 years, it all seems like a smooth operation but they're constantly facing issues. Labour and training problems, international actors that won't pay and their governments won't help, shipping problems, supply chain problems. Liability issues. IP issues with some special things they do. Orders come in batches, they might have a down year and possibly have to play people off. And I'm not even getting into the very basics of product development, financing the working capital i.e. the regular stuff employees do.
People who think CEO's just show up and wear suits and have meetings, and kiss up to the board ... I don't think have any exposure to what the job entails.
A CEO compared is a walk in the park. All those issues you've mentioned ("Labour and training problems, international actors that won't pay and their governments won't help, shipping problems, supply chain problems") are there in any business (even in a single person shop).
If you can avoid that, it must be a great job. Massive pay, no labor, people do what you say, and if you screw up the politics and get fired you’re still set for life.
The implications of this are not great.
-leading a company
-dealing with finances
-constantly making important decisions
As a hard job.
This does not explain how CEOs such as Fiorina and Elop can inject themselves into established companies, run them into the ground, and still walk away with lavish rewards. They are in a completely different category than ordinary Workers.
And even hard to get right matters little if you have a golden parachute (as many CEOs do). You can drive a company (or an entire sector) to the ground and still get your nice bonus.
Not that the CEO should be completely out of the loop (she has to sign off, after all).
But if a CEO is dealing with nitty, gritty details if finances there's a severe delegation issue at best and a detail obsessed control-freak at worst.
A European company with major cash holdings may want to diversify currency, but that could be seen as speculative. The working capital requirements and details of the revolving loans they have from the bank. The list goes on.
The value-adds from a good CEO are outstanding strategy, positive corporate brand creation, and investor/shareholder relationship management.
The first two aren't hard in the bureaucratic sense, but in the creative sense. A lot of CEOs are terrible at them - see the long list of companies run into the ground by very poor decisions.
The last one is helped a lot by having the correct class background. It's nightmarishly hard for outsiders, and can be anywhere from not hard at all to equally nightmarish for insiders.
No wonder a lot of top level executives are psychopaths, the emotional detachment must really help.
Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.
> Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.
While there are undoubtedly success stories which resemble both of these caricatures, I think they're in the minority. I can't say I'm hobnobbing with the Forbes billionaires list but I have personal relationships with many people who built successful businesses. Betting on a unique opportunity is often an amplifier, so is starting in a good place in terms of money/family. But what they all have in common is they focused religiously on the top line, they didn't fuck up the bottom line, and they worked very hard.
Having the resources to take risks is the number one factor to succeeding, I think. Being able to identify good opportunities comes after that.
Baseball is easy when you have unlimited at-bats.
I agree that having financial resources is a huge leg up, but I don't believe it's mandatory. My beliefs are formed from personal experience. I came from a working class family that lived below the poverty line. My parents kicked me out at 18 with a warning that if I ever wanted to come back I'd better be ready to pay them rent. (Resolved that I would never take them up on that offer, never did.) When I started my business I had $250 in the bank and no idea how I was going to pay the next month's rent.
For years I failed and I sacrificed where I had to. I worked long hours at terrible rates, I didn't spend a dollar more than necessary to survive, I gave up on my hope of saving and buying property, I neglected my health, I gave up on my hope of finding a partner and starting a family because women aren't interested in a nerd who has nothing to his name except dreams.
These are the sacrifices you can make if you aren't born into wealth but you want to achieve it. Some people absolutely have success handed to them. They have a safety net which allows them to fail until they succeed. For the rest of us, you sacrifice time, energy, opportunity, and health.
It took years but it worked, one day I hit on a great business and it all turned around.
Being broke certainly limits the type of opportunity you can invest in, but there's always something.
Always? It's not a law of physics...
Where does the "harm" you talk about come from? Usually it's because there are other responsibilities you're engaged with. If you literally give everything else up to focus on one thing, these barbs aren't in your life. I'm talking forgoing rent to crash with family/friends, eating ramen, selling/getting rid of your things, live on credit cards, etc, and have a 24/7 focus that keeps you going.
You'd be surprised how much that frees you from the immediate "harm" you describe, but you also have nothing to fall back on, because you pretty much have nothing else anymore than your pursuit, and can be amassing enormous debt (financial and otherwise). It's a huge amortized, pushed-forward harm in the hopes that the gamble pays off. For many, it doesn't.
All the things you described doing are the fallback options - you have to have a family and friends, things to sell, credit to burn. Even then, family or friends have less patience to carry you when you’re taking a moonshot unless they also have a lot they can fall back on.
That's not a judgement on what they choose, but many times the "lack of privilege" is really they because they made different choices.
From https://sidsavara.com/why-3-of-harvard-mbas-make-ten-times-a...
“Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” In 1979, interviewers asked new graduates from the Harvard’s MBA Program and found that :
84% had no specific goals at all
13% had goals but they were not committed to paper
3% had clear, written goals and plans to accomplish them
The 13% of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all.
Even more staggering – the three percent who had clear, written goals were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent put together.
Edit: I had often heard of this study and just pasted the first reference I found. I would delete this post, if I could, as its credibility is questionable. Thanks femto.
Though it's claimed that the myth did prompt an actual study (not peer reviewed?)
https://sidsavara.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/researchsum...
Which claims to support a fuzzier notion that writing things down helps achieve a goal.
She grew up rich, with the freedom to pursue her passion from the age of 10, when her mother would take her to karaoke contests. The ability to up stakes and move to Nashville, to have your father buy your way into a record label... well... it doesn’t overshadow her natural ability, but it helps to explain how she was able to leverage it so effectively.
Exactly - she won the lottery being born into a rich white family in the U.S.
But Bo Burnham’s quote really isn’t about that, he’s talking about getting lucky and having your career take off. The truth is that many many lotteries typically need to be won before you can even enter that lottery. My point was that Taylor Swift didn’t just “take a chance” on music, she used all of her existing wins to stack the deck in her favor. If you look at a lot of CEO’s the same is true of them, and it’s not just the luck of their career taking off, but the luck of ever being in a position to have that happen.
Nitpick, but this isn't actually true (see lawsuit she won), and we don't really have any way to know if it was true even before she became famous. I agree with your general point, though.
I think it was about both. Later in the clip he says to Conan O'Brien "We're tall white guys, we overcame nothing to get here."