A team of software developers were recently let go so a company could replace them with AI. So they got together and created an Open Source AI CEO to replace the CEO and other executives. Hopefully, turnabout is fair play and this might even get some folks to think twice about using AI to replace people.
VohuMana · 2026-08-27 02:33:14 UTC
This is hilarious, I feel like we are going to see AI companies add something to the system prompt or terms of service that explicitly forbids having an LLM act as CEO. Honestly though I do hope this gives pause to the C suite when it comes to replacing people with AI
ThrowawayR2 · 2026-08-27 02:34:01 UTC
Corporate officers, including CEOs, have to be "natural persons" (legal jargon for flesh-and-blood humans) either directly by law or indirectly as a practical matter so the attempted turnabout falls flat on its face.
Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
forgetfreeman · 2026-08-27 03:11:26 UTC
Neat. Hire an intern to prompt the "CEO" as needed. Problem solved.
cwillu · 2026-08-27 03:23:43 UTC
If the paperwork says the intern is the CEO, then the intern is the CEO, regardless of how much the intern's agent's github says otherwise.
forgetfreeman · 2026-08-27 04:15:54 UTC
Yep. You're starting to catch on. Same functionality, significant cost savings for the organization.
cwillu · 2026-08-27 06:25:09 UTC
The intern might be convinced to do something other than what the bot says.
forgetfreeman · 2026-08-27 13:47:36 UTC
Maybe, maybe not. A lot of folks would gleefully avoid rocking the boat if handed a job this cushy. If they do flake out you could ask if anyone in facilities would like to take a break from emptying trashcans...
ithkuil · 2026-08-27 18:39:02 UTC
Then the board can fire that CEO?
ThrowawayR2 · 2026-08-27 03:44:45 UTC
This is one of those rejoinders that tries to be clever but really, really isn't. The "intern as fake CEO" is left holding the bag because it's their signature on contracts and other legal documents. The idea of puppet CEOs to fraudulently dodge accountability existed well before LLMs became a thing. Courts see right through that kind of scheme plus the "intern" is likely to turn coat against the mastermind to save their own skin at the first sign of trouble.
forgetfreeman · 2026-08-27 04:15:23 UTC
If you think CEOs are the primary legal signatories for their company you might need to spend some time away from garage band startups. Companies maintain entire legal departments for a reason.
bee_rider · 2026-08-27 03:45:49 UTC
I’d be more interested to see a collection of independent guild, unions, and co-ops that voluntarily coordinate through an AI intermediary.
Because the AI can’t really own things or be held responsible, the idea of a skeuomorphic AI seems quite silly. Keep the ownership in the humans, but plural, and have them in contact with the actual work.
jayemar · 2026-08-27 15:54:09 UTC
Couldn't "indirectly as a practical matter" be interpreted as what this project is attempting to challenge?
ThrowawayR2 · 2026-08-27 17:40:58 UTC
How so? Even in a jurisdiction where corporate officers aren't required to be a natural person, trying to have an AI CEO is like trying to make a cat/dog a CEO. As a practical matter, it is not a legal entity recognized as capable of entering into agreements so no government or other business will accept legal documents, contracts, etc. signed by the AI CEO or signed by a human claiming to act under the AI's (not valid) authority as CEO delegated to them. If I had to guess the latter would likely be considered fraud.
Unless some movement forms to get broad agreement that an AI instance can constitute a legal person (some kind of AI equivalent of corporate personhood, which nobody seems to like), this project is DOA.
Animats · 2026-08-27 01:54:35 UTC
Is this automated CEO any good? Is there a listing from a demo session?
GrumpySciGuy · 2026-08-27 02:11:32 UTC
Highly configurable. Looks like it is targeted at any level of management. The key features seems that it can generate its own vision of how to move something forward and that it can be set with degrees of freedom depending on the use case. Video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_g97xxVTMk
shermantanktop · 2026-08-27 02:20:29 UTC
The speech model for the voiceover should be named “Max Vocalfry.”
georgemcbay · 2026-08-27 02:27:43 UTC
> Is this automated CEO any good?
Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
jayroh · 2026-08-27 02:57:48 UTC
Peak comment right here
edoceo · 2026-08-27 02:26:27 UTC
What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?
Making resources available to the team? AI.
Coordinating between teams? AI.
Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?
More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.
One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
nullorempty · 2026-08-27 02:29:20 UTC
Well, as soon as they start being replaced is there a network to bring.
andsoitis · 2026-08-27 02:37:01 UTC
> Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
Freedom2 · 2026-08-27 02:39:38 UTC
Like RTO mandates which were definitely made with wisdom.
andsoitis · 2026-08-27 02:41:15 UTC
Not all CEOs did that. Just like all software engineers aren't great or excellent, all CEOs aren't. But to categorically denounce seems rigid.
sandeepkd · 2026-08-27 03:21:08 UTC
This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down.
My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
andsoitis · 2026-08-27 03:46:11 UTC
> This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down.
I believe that the average are average.
I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
inkyoto · 2026-08-27 02:38:39 UTC
In the current legal framework, AI can't be held accountable, a human being is required.
That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.
valleyer · 2026-08-27 02:41:19 UTC
Good point. CEOs of companies are often held personally accountable for corporate malfeasance by "the current legal framework".
fooker · 2026-08-27 02:50:14 UTC
I understand your sarcasm but that’s what the limited in LLC is for.
Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes.
Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
valleyer · 2026-08-27 02:51:59 UTC
I agree. I just thought it was funny that someone was pointing out the legal unaccountability of an AI in this context.
inkyoto · 2026-08-27 03:15:32 UTC
There is no need for two penny sarcasm.
I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.
My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
vasco · 2026-08-27 03:35:44 UTC
The sarcasm was pretty funny so it has some utility, no need to be so serious
nradov · 2026-08-27 03:15:52 UTC
LLCs and other corporate structures only (mostly) protect employees and shareholders from civil judgments. CEOs and other executives are also at risk of criminal penalties for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) violations and similar. Actual criminal prosecutions of CEOs have been few, but not zero.
The typical corporate trick is to argue that the corporation itself is responsible for any wrongdoing, not a particular executive.
I can totally see this blame being shifted to AI in a "nobody got fired for choosing IBM" way.
stale2002 · 2026-08-27 02:39:39 UTC
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
rideontime · 2026-08-27 02:47:34 UTC
Many people observe reality, where the workers end up being the ones held accountable for the CEO's decisions, not the CEO.
matchbok3 · 2026-08-27 02:58:49 UTC
Workers are not legally or financially accountable for any of that. That is the whole point of a "job". I think you are confused.
rideontime · 2026-08-27 03:12:03 UTC
Are you confusing CEOs with founders, shareholders, etc.? Chief Executive Officer is, in fact, a "job."
NegativeLatency · 2026-08-27 03:12:14 UTC
Neither are CEOs in our present society
JDups · 2026-08-27 03:13:15 UTC
When the worker loses their jobs over bad executive decisions, they sure feel like they were pretty harshly financially penalized for those decisions.
matchbok3 · 2026-08-27 14:58:25 UTC
And they can get a new job? Or should people be in the same job all their life?
SpicyLemonZest · 2026-08-27 04:11:23 UTC
Many people observe a limited subset of reality. It's highly visible when a company hits a crisis and people lose their jobs; it's much more common, but much less visible, for a CEO to get an after-hours call about a brewing problem which they must immediately work to smooth over.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r · 2026-08-27 09:42:51 UTC
It’s amazing how many people on this website harp on about nobody noticing their hard work, nobody caring unless the server is down, etc, and not being able to conceive of the remote chance of this same phenomenon applying to other roles in an organisation.
rideontime · 2026-08-27 14:22:17 UTC
You truly don't see the difference between those two examples?
SpicyLemonZest · 2026-08-27 16:02:22 UTC
I'm not quite sure why you ask that? I'm not arguing that these two very different examples are the same, I'm explaining more concretely what it means to say that a CEO's job is to "to be responsible to the business".
rideontime · 2026-08-28 11:24:45 UTC
And you don't see being laid off due to the business's failure as being "responsible to the business"?
sandeepkd · 2026-08-27 03:22:56 UTC
I wish that was true some how. In real world unfortunately the buck stops at whoever is easy scape goat, at times it can be a CEO
a34729t · 2026-08-27 03:56:03 UTC
Rewponsibility is why we pay external consultants!
Zanfa · 2026-08-27 07:19:48 UTC
Doesn't this usually just mean saying "I take full responsibility" and then firing a bunch of unrelated people?
jaggederest · 2026-08-27 02:41:41 UTC
To paraphrase Andy Grove:
> The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
(And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions)
To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
bronson · 2026-08-27 02:57:27 UTC
> AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not
Well, so do most CEOs.
parineum · 2026-08-27 04:21:22 UTC
There are hundreds of thousands of CEOs of companies you've never heard of.
mrheosuper · 2026-08-27 03:13:55 UTC
>AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
So they need someone to review AI output huh?
edoceo · 2026-08-27 03:15:05 UTC
If the operation is to distill options into a few choices, and then pick the "best" one then, I think hivemind can win there too. Real-time democracy running a business.
For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
vasco · 2026-08-27 03:29:18 UTC
> Real-time democracy running a business
This is not a competitive advantage
DoctorOetker · 2026-08-27 03:42:35 UTC
Neither is dictatorship?
jeezfrk · 2026-08-27 03:56:46 UTC
Business actually treats a pseudo-dictatorship (with the requisite yes-men) as "good leadership".
Most times it's pretty simple, in my experience. A CEO either runs a business as a (1) Sales focus [best deals and vendors] or (2) Marketing focus [best reputation and trends] or (3) Investor focus [best boardroom friends].
Lots of other opinions are usually thrown out until there's really only one facet used for running the company.
vintermann · 2026-08-27 04:51:04 UTC
Sure, if by business you mean investors.
kian · 2026-08-27 06:14:07 UTC
is there a (4) or (5) that would be preferable? :)
parineum · 2026-08-27 04:24:23 UTC
It is.
The best products are usually from single minds with a strong vision. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" is a phrase for a reason.
Your least favorite products are designed by committee or a vision less person following trends.
vintermann · 2026-08-27 04:52:12 UTC
As long as investors believe this, it matters less if it's true or not.
jaggederest · 2026-08-27 04:43:08 UTC
Nope! that's the subtlety. "distill options" is not the CEO's (or any executive's) job.
The way he phrases it, if I remember correctly (and this is by no means the only way to executive, I just really like his framing), is that the way you make decisions is by getting your immediate subordinates to agree, and they iterate. Decisions should be made at the lowest level that they can be made at, and if that's the CEO level, you've made mistakes.
So you make the values list, you make sure that people live by it (up to and including firing people who don't and hiring people who do, which he basically thinks is the whole day to day), and then you bring your subordinates together to agree on decisions. If they don't agree, you send them off to work through it together and come back with consensus (or, less great, compromise). If you have to put your thumb on the scale to get a good decision, again, you're not CEOing well.
Basically if you have to be a dictator, there's no way you can actually effectively do that. Proper leadership is getting people to act the way you would, if you had all the knowledge and perspective they do, but without having to make them do it. Lift them up, empower them, give them the responsibility and tools and values, and then endorse the result.
dan_can_code · 2026-08-27 05:06:28 UTC
Enforcing culture is not something I believe is possible. Nobody is going to listen to the C suite suit over their own experience with their colleagues. People just end up saying the right buzzwords to appear that the culture has been adopted, but it will be mostly met with malicious compliance. If the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour,then that's a whole different ball game.
snoman · 2026-08-27 06:07:06 UTC
> Enforcing culture is not something I believe is possible.
> … the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour…
Not sure what your definition of enforcing is… but it doesn’t have to be by actual force.
thelastgallon · 2026-08-27 02:48:08 UTC
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out.
These are all impossible tasks for AI. AI can't play golf.
conductr · 2026-08-27 03:21:27 UTC
It’s going to be funny when the Tesla robots start showing up at tee times because the CEO couldn’t make it. Like a meeting agent taking notes for people who didn’t attend
a34729t · 2026-08-27 03:55:27 UTC
Chinese humanoid robots are 3 years out from playing a decent round on a par 3 course.
psd1 · 2026-08-27 23:55:19 UTC
Full self-drive and self-putt?
newyankee · 2026-08-27 05:12:29 UTC
See, the issue is CEOs capture a fair amount of value but ultimately it is the owners and the main shareholders who hire them for that value to insulate themselves from day to day running of the company. The maximum value of the company is accruing to the shareholders in a public company anyways. While the morality of the right nos compared to median 'worker' can always be debated, I still find CEO earns 500x that of median worker type comparisons a little bit disingenuous and it totally insulates the owner class.
forestrywat · 2026-08-27 03:40:52 UTC
Managers coach and develop people. Helping them grow, nurturing their strengths and connecting them with opportunities that help them achieve more.
At least the good ones do.
mulderc · 2026-08-27 05:33:10 UTC
Yes, that is a good manager, but in my experience, it is better if the culture of the team is about ensuring everyone has opportunities to grow, build on their strengths, and connect with opportunities. When that is considered the manager’s job, and not the job of every member of the team, people get neglected, and many strengths and opportunities go to waste.
forestrywat · 2026-08-27 05:50:52 UTC
Best managers make this the core culture in the team.
mulderc · 2026-08-27 06:53:48 UTC
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." — God
swader999 · 2026-08-27 03:42:30 UTC
Marketing and they hire and fire important people. That's about it though, where we should take the product, what features to do next, partnerships, these are pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
collingreen · 2026-08-27 04:03:22 UTC
I don't think these things are obvious. I've worked at many places that have had big, company-changing forks in the road available to them and navigating those forks wasn't easy (and in my opinion several times we chose wrong). The crowd wasn't always right or even well aligned and sometimes the only agreement was that a middle of the road approach would be worse. My intuition says getting that right takes a lot of luck, good momentum, and a lot of departments working well together (bringing in and communicating market info, broadcasting marketing that works, making good partnerships, etc). The cynic in me thinks one big impact of a ceo is the various cheating and corruption tools that can make some of those things easier or at least less critical to get right (you don't need to make good cybertrucks or convince people to buy them if the government agrees to buy 450k of them as "armored vehicles", for example).
If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
expensive_news · 2026-08-27 03:48:59 UTC
At my current job, a 10 person startup, the CEOs job is to generate leads, talk to potential customers, and close deals. He, along with the other founders, shape what we work on based on what he thinks it’s possible for us to sell. He’s essential to the business.
At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
cybrox · 2026-08-27 03:59:31 UTC
Similar, yes, but instead of finding out who else can give you money at 10 people, they have to find out who else they have to give money at 10k people. Leads and lobbies.
vintermann · 2026-08-27 04:53:27 UTC
That's a sales person.
nkmnz · 2026-08-27 07:02:29 UTC
A sales person is usually trained on an existing product or portfolio of products (including services). A good sales person might use their exposure to customers for gathering valuable information to feed back into their upstream org. But this is completely different from someone who has to actively shape a both sides of the company, value delivery and value creation, because both need to mature in a choreographed manner.
So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
moregrist · 2026-08-27 07:08:02 UTC
There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
volkercraig · 2026-08-27 04:19:59 UTC
CEO's exist as a sink for liability. When something goes wrong, they are the fall guys, that's ultimately their job. That's why CEO compensation is generally correlated strongly to earnings and they usually have golden parachutes.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
SlightlyLeftPad · 2026-08-27 04:25:53 UTC
They manage people. They’re people people.
baalimago · 2026-08-27 04:53:56 UTC
They ensure the company is funded.
gib444 · 2026-08-27 09:25:12 UTC
This! They sell the company and vision to potential investors
hansvm · 2026-08-27 05:04:15 UTC
> can AI do <hard thing>
Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines.
> What do CEOs do
No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing.
> and other managers
There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
penguin_booze · 2026-08-27 06:02:38 UTC
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?
Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r · 2026-08-27 09:40:38 UTC
If you were legitimately suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of a typical ‘CEO’, chances are you’d shit your britches within a month.
Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing.
Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
meta_gunslinger · 2026-08-27 12:12:55 UTC
Exactly, as also evidenced by the guy who was brutally murdered just because he was the CEO of a company someone had an axe to grind against.
e36 · 2026-08-27 16:58:01 UTC
This account is posting comments every 0.01 seconds.
Zylokloto · 2026-08-27 06:45:04 UTC
Good ones actually are quite aware of the industry, connect the dots and setup the company to be sustainable, growing and ready when its time to be ready.
Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood.
Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it.
Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)
Comments
Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
Because the AI can’t really own things or be held responsible, the idea of a skeuomorphic AI seems quite silly. Keep the ownership in the humans, but plural, and have them in contact with the actual work.
Unless some movement forms to get broad agreement that an AI instance can constitute a legal person (some kind of AI equivalent of corporate personhood, which nobody seems to like), this project is DOA.
Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?
Making resources available to the team? AI.
Coordinating between teams? AI.
Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?
More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.
One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
I believe that the average are average.
I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.
Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes.
Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.
My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/oklahomacity/press-release...
I can totally see this blame being shifted to AI in a "nobody got fired for choosing IBM" way.
The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
> The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
(And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions)
To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
Well, so do most CEOs.
So they need someone to review AI output huh?
For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
This is not a competitive advantage
Most times it's pretty simple, in my experience. A CEO either runs a business as a (1) Sales focus [best deals and vendors] or (2) Marketing focus [best reputation and trends] or (3) Investor focus [best boardroom friends].
Lots of other opinions are usually thrown out until there's really only one facet used for running the company.
The best products are usually from single minds with a strong vision. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" is a phrase for a reason.
Your least favorite products are designed by committee or a vision less person following trends.
The way he phrases it, if I remember correctly (and this is by no means the only way to executive, I just really like his framing), is that the way you make decisions is by getting your immediate subordinates to agree, and they iterate. Decisions should be made at the lowest level that they can be made at, and if that's the CEO level, you've made mistakes.
So you make the values list, you make sure that people live by it (up to and including firing people who don't and hiring people who do, which he basically thinks is the whole day to day), and then you bring your subordinates together to agree on decisions. If they don't agree, you send them off to work through it together and come back with consensus (or, less great, compromise). If you have to put your thumb on the scale to get a good decision, again, you're not CEOing well.
Basically if you have to be a dictator, there's no way you can actually effectively do that. Proper leadership is getting people to act the way you would, if you had all the knowledge and perspective they do, but without having to make them do it. Lift them up, empower them, give them the responsibility and tools and values, and then endorse the result.
> … the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour…
Not sure what your definition of enforcing is… but it doesn’t have to be by actual force.
Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out.
These are all impossible tasks for AI. AI can't play golf.
At least the good ones do.
If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines.
> What do CEOs do
No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing.
> and other managers
There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.
Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing.
Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood.
Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it.
Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)