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Why the most successful companies don’t necessarily have the most competent CEOs

szabolcs.ai · 1,266 words · saved by 1 readers

CEOs of successful companies are, surprisingly often, not as competent as they could be. To put it differently, the best companies you see around are not necessarily run by the people most competent to run them. By company here, I mean high-growth, high-risk technology companies. Think about a time when you looked at a product, and it was just clear that it wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. For some products, people can just sense that something is obviously wrong in them. I realize that this is a rough approximation only, as products can be bad for a variety of reasons (e.g. a network-effect business, special distribution situations, etc). That said, this blog post is about a specific subset of when a product feels unoptimized1. You always need to look at the selection criteria and incentive structures. Looking at the criteria for “successful tech CEOs,” it’s roughly 1) being in a position to think about and start a company in the first place and 2) the company surviving long enou

Why the most successful companies don’t necessarily have the most competent CEOs Posts Subscribe About Why the most successful companies don’t necessarily have the most competent CEOs CEOs of successful tech companies are, surprisingly often, not as competent as they could be. To put it differently, the best companies you see around are not necessarily run by the people most competent to run them. Think about a time when you looked at a product, and it was just clear that it wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. For some products, you get this tacit feeling that yes, it does generally work, and

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