Joel Liu's Library tagged leadership →  View Popular, Search in Google

Let’s look at this one attribute at a time:

 
• Articulation of the vision—There is no question that some people are much better story tellers than others. However, it is also true that anybody can greatly improve in this area through focus and hard work. All CEOs should work on the vision component of leadership.
• Alignment
  Alignment of interests—I am not sure if the Bill Campbell Attribute is impossible to learn, but I am pretty sure that it is impossible to teach. Of the three, this one most fits the bill “born not made.”
• Ability to achieve the vision—This attribute can absolutely be made; perhaps this is why Andy Grove’s tolerance for incompetence was legendarily low. Indeed, the enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.

• Articulation of the vision—There is no question that some people are much better story tellers than others. However, it is also true that anybody can greatly improve in this area through focus and hard work. All CEOs should work on the vision component of leadership.
• Alignment of interests—I am not sure if the Bill Campbell Attribute is impossible to learn, but I am pretty sure that it is impossible to teach. Of the three, this one most fits the bill “born not made.”
• Ability to achieve the vision—This attribute can absolutely be made; perhaps this is why Andy Grove’s tolerance for incompetence was legendarily low. Indeed, the enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.
 

In the end, some attributes of leadership can be improved more than others, but every CEO should work on all three.

Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions. Great decisions come from CEOs who display an elite combination of intelligence, logic, and courage.

Courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. In fact, at the time of the decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10% of the information typically present in the ensuing Harvard Business School case study. As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

• What are the competitors likely to do?
• What’s possible technically and in what time frame?
• What are the true capabilities of the organization and how can you maximize them?
• How much financial risk does this imply?
• What will the issues be given your current product architecture?
• Will the employees be energized or
  despondent
  despondent about this promotion?
 

Great CEOs build exceptional strategies for gathering the required information continuously. They embed their quest for intelligence into all of their daily actions from staff meetings to customer meetings to 1:1s. Winning strategies are built on comprehensive knowledge gathered in every interaction the CEO has with an employee, a customer, a partner, an investor, and so on.

In order for a company to execute a broad set of decisions and initiatives, it must:

 
• Have the capacity to do so – In other words, the company must contain the necessary talent in the right positions to execute the strategy.
• Be a place where every employees can get things accomplished – the employees must be motivated, communication must be strong, the amount of common knowledge must be vast, and the context must be clear.