CEO SPECIAL ..................How difficult is it to be a CEO?

How difficult is it to be a CEO?





Auren Hoffman, LiveRamp CEO.

Started and sold 5 companies (and many more that failed) Being a CEO is at least twice as hard as the next hardest position in a company. It is really, really hard. This is especially true with founder CEOs.

To make the job easier, CEOs should try to make as few decisions as possible.Great CEOs should be pushing most of the company's decisions to other people in the organisation. The CEO should try to never be a bottleneck for decisions. This frees up the CEO's time to focus on the most important decisions (and has the added benefit of growing people in the organisation because of the trust that's put on them).It is not always obvious which decisions to make. Sometimes seemingly small decisions are actually really important. For me, there are three core decisions the CEO should focus on:

1. Core Strategy

Developing, understanding, and communicating the core company strategy. Making sure that everyone in the company understands the strategy. Making sure the strategy is accomplishable. And making sure the company is very focused (doing as few things as possible). Usually, the most important decisions a CEO can make is to know when to stop doing things and how to focus the organisation on just a few things.

2. Core Culture

This is where some really small decisions are actually really important to the company. I don't think CEOs should delegate this (and it is really hard to think of any great CEOs who ever delegated culture). Current and past CEOs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, Jack Welch, Mark Zuckerberg, Jorge Paulo Lemann, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, and others are maniacally focused on culture. As Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for lunch.“ Seemingly little things like work expectations, vacation policy, reimbursement policy, company rules, compensation policies, and more can have massive reverberations throughout the company.

3. Hiring and Developing Talent

I'm surprised how little time many CEOs spend on hiring and growing the talent they have. Growing talent gives a company a real competitive advantage.Besides for these three things, CEOs should try to push all other decisions to the organisation.

(http:www.quora.comHow difficult-is-it-to-be-a-CEO)