A good CEO spends most of his or her time thinking, analysing, and designing. Not running things. Not making a hundred little decisions. Not putting out fires. Not schmoozing with customers. Not playing politics.
The CEO’s main job is to design and establish an organisational machine that always achieves the goals of the company.
This includes designing systems that work all the time and rarely fail to deliver. This includes finding and developing the right people. People who don’t have to be constantly supervised, monitored, or motivated. It includes designing work processes that don't have to constantly be fixed. It includes designing work processes that normal people can operate without super-human efforts and major stress. The word for all this is robust. Robust means the systems can take challenges and not break or fail to achieve goals.
The CEO must be ever alert for problems and opportunities. There are always a few problems coming at the corporation that will seriously challenge its ability to survive. A good CEO sees them very early. Earlier than everyone else. He already has the strategy and fixes in place before they arrive. The good CEO also sees those very few opportunities that will make or break the company over the long haul. Again, the good CEO sees them earlier than everyone else. He capitalizes on them quickly and decisively.
A good CEO can sometimes make a single decision in his or her career that decides the fate of a company for the next ten years. They can make a single decision whose economic impact can pay their salary forever. I have done it on more than one occasion.
What a CEO should do is handle strategic issues. These are things that are unknown to the average worker.
A good CEO must also have a deep understanding of what business the company is in and insure that the business strategy does not drift or creep away from the core business.
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