优秀CEO的思维定势与实践
战略与公司财务实务
     CEO的工作既困难又重要。这本指南试图说明最优秀的首席执行官是如何思考和行动的。
A company has only one peerless role: chief
executive officer. It’s the most powerful and soughtafter
title in business, more exciting, rewarding,
and influential than any other. What the CEO
controls—the company’s biggest moves—accounts
for 45 percent of a company’s performance.1
Despite the luster of the role, serving as a CEO can
be all-consuming, lonely, and stressful. Just three in
five newly appointed CEOs live up to performance
expectations in their first 18 months on the job.2
The high standards and broad expectations of
directors, shareholders, customers, and employees
create an environment of relentless scrutiny in
which one move can dramatically make or derail an
accomplished career.
For all the scrutiny of the CEO’s role, though, little
is solidly understood about what CEOs really do to
excel. McKinsey’s longtime leader, Marvin Bower,
considered the CEO’s job so specialized that he
felt executives could prepare for the post only by
holding it. Many of the CEOs we’ve worked with have
expressed similar views. In their experience, even
asking other CEOs how to approach the job doesn’t
help, because suggestions vary greatly once they go
beyond high-level advice such as “set the strategy,”
“shape the culture,” and “get the right team.” Perhaps
that’s not surprising—industry contexts differ, as do
leadership preferences—but it illustrates that fellow
CEOs don’t necessarily make reliable guides.
Nor has academic and other research on the CEO’s
role done much to illuminate how CEOs think and
what they do to excel. For example, recent studies
that detail how CEOs spend their time don’t show
the difference between a good use of time and a
bad one. Academic research also demonstrates that
traits such as drive, resilience, and risk tolerance
make CEOs more successful. This insight is helpful
during a search for a new CEO, but it’s hardly
one that sitting CEOs can use to improve their
performance. Other research has tended to produce
such findings as the observation that leaders are
effective in some situations and ineffective in
others—interesting, but less than instructive.
With this article, we set out to show which mindsets
and practices are proven to make CEOs most
effective. It is the fruit of a long-running effort to
study performance data on thousands of CEOs,
revisit our firsthand experience helping CEOs
enhance their leadership approaches, and extract a
set of empirical, broadly applicable insights on how
excellent CEOs think and act. We also offer a selfassessment
guide to help CEOs (and CEO watchers,
such as boards of directors) determine how closely
they adhere to the mindsets and practices that are
closely associated with superior CEO performance.
Our hope is that all CEOs, new or long-tenured,
can use these tools to better apply their scarce
time and energy.