CEOs are certainly important
for the organization that they lead.
We all have heard the stories of the larger-than-life CEO
whose own name and brand transcends the company
that he or she is representing.
This is exciting because you see their names on headlines.
You see them with a big following.
People are interested in leaning in, wanting
to know what this big personality is going to say next,
and what their organization is going to do next.
But there's a big question here of the role that
that CEO plays within our culture, in establishing how
that product, that service that they represent, will service
the nation will service other nations and the world
at large. I think about larger-than-life CEOs
like Steve Jobs, like Jack Dorsey, like Elon Musk,
they have a platform and I would argue then a responsibility
to stand upon it and look at how their products,
how their personalities, how their contributions are
affecting the world and the discourse about the future
of tech, the future of work and the future of how
we interact at large.
Steve Jobs in particular fascinates me.
He could be direct, he could be mean,
but he could be very focused and specific
about what he wanted and the excellence that he demanded
of his people, and in doing so, he created something
that was unlike anything anybody had ever experienced.
He really thought that the beauty was in the simplicity.
The iPhone is just a simple little black rectangle
that has changed how we communicate, how we talk.
STEVE JOBS: Our goal and we think
what serves the customer best
is to constantly be working on making things better.
ANNA BUTRICO: Though a complicated character,
he elevated these questions
of how the form of the things that we consume
influences how we live and work with them.
A CEO has great opportunity to elevate the brand
of a company, to really put it
in the public eye and make people really trust
in the brand that they're buying.
But they also have the opportunity to do the exact opposite.
The risk you run is when that personality,
that brand of the person is bigger than the brand
of what the organization of a whole aims to achieve.
Leadership is important, don't get me wrong
but when leadership steps on the company,
when leadership contradicts what the company wants
to do, then you have a bigger problem.
I'll start with Patrick Byrne
who was the CEO of Overstock.com.
He was a very impressive leader.
He had three degrees. He had long history at Overstock.com.
He had helped them go online.
It was really in the most exciting part
of the business that it had ever been historically.
He ended up having a private blog
where he would talk about the earnings,
where he would foreshadow new developments
within the company but he would also start
to talk about some conspiracy theories that he had
about himself about his role as Overstock.com CEO
and how that interacted with the government.
He believed that he was tied up into a political scandal
that would be a hundred times bigger
than Watergate as he said.
He said that a Russian spy
was intimately involved in his life.
The stock of Overstock.com crashed
because people said who in the world is the CEO
and what is he saying?
And what does that say about the Overstock brand?
The other one we think
about is Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos.
They created this new blood testing technology
that was really fascinating.
What we found though,
is that Elizabeth Holmes was a bit deceptive
in the science, that Theranos technology didn't work.
They had a very easy, accessible result
of a test that they would use
with investors that they would use publicly to say, look
our technology works when behind the scenes, it didn't.
She very intentionally took her board of directors
and made sure that none of them were scientists.
Some of them were former MDs.
A lot of them were policy officials.
None of them really knew much about the specific
blood testing technology that she aimed to create.
So she went completely unhinged
in how she was advocating for the technology,
she'd fire anybody who stood up to protest it.
When selecting a CEO, what should you think about?
Is it best to just think about what values
the organization has and if that person
will fit inside those values?
I think it's a bit tricky
because values just like people constantly change.
Each value is a narrative about who the organization is.
And the leader themself introduces their own narrative
about where they are taking the company.
I think having a really diverse board
of directors is absolutely critical.
You need to have people who hold that CEO accountable
but who have very different views of what the CEO is doing
what industry the organization sits in,
what the objectives are, et cetera, et cetera.
Diversity of thought is
of course important; capability, crucial.
But that thought piece
to really challenge that CEO is critical.