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More Smoke than Fire: The Real Story of CEOs
There's a great article in Computerworld today about how CEOs are faking it a lot more than most people expect. If you think about how large and complex some of today's businesses are, isn't that kind of obvious?
Somewhere in our collective past, whether in movies, school, or TV, we have gotten the idea that the chief executive must be the alpha male. He must be the smartest, shrewdest, the best dressed, the quickest on his feet. But that doesn't really hold up in practice. i remember hearing a CEO trainer say that if everyone who secretly thought they were a fake left the room, the conference room would be empty. He had a point.
That's not saying that they are hypocrites, although that is one way to look at it. Probably a more perceptive explanation is that there is simply no way one person can measure up to everything that is expected of them. In fact, most times less is more.
Sometimes the best managers are the ones who do the least, Sutton said, quoting an aphorism he attributed to 3M Co.'s retired senior vice president of research and development, Bill Coyne: "When you plant a seed in the ground, you don't dig it up every week to see how it works."
I remember working at a large organization that was adopting a new way of creating software. After I was there a few months I finally had to ask the SVP, "Why did you guys choose to do this, anyway?"
"The CIO's kid bought a book about this process," he said, "and dad saw it sitting on the kitchen table, so here we are."
I probably could have done without knowing that, but I took it in stride. Of course, I had wanted some answer like, "after careful study and a decision-making process, this alternative was chosen" but that's not always the way things work. After all, we're only mammals. Sometimes I think we expect too much out of each other.
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