Beware of CEO Stories
Lately, I’ve consumed several CEO biographies, including those of Ursula Burns, Bob Iger, Indra Nooyi, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Amb. Susan Rice.
As I read each of them, two thoughts kept coming to mind.
First, I thought of my friend Michael, who said of his experience at Harvard Business School: “They teach you how to make decisions like a CEO. But they don’t tell you that the path to becoming a CEO isn’t that fun, and neither is actually being a CEO.”
Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, described it thusly in My Life in Full: “[...] competing to reach the very top of an organizational pyramid is a brutal business no matter who you are, and once a woman or a man is within striking distance of the CEO’s office—two or three levels away—the idea of balancing work with any kind of normal life outside work isn’t practical.”
She cites as part of her success “the special genetics of not having to sleep more than five hours a night.”
Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox wrote of her experience in Where You Are Is Not Who You Are: “Other than working, I slept and I ate. But even when I ate, I was available and often engrossed in the Xerox world.” She eventually learned to take Saturday noon to Sunday 8pm as her time off.
It was only after Warren Buffett’s first wife left him that he realized that a life solely dedicated to making money had downsides.
“While he was friendly enough with his kids, he hadn’t really gotten to know them. The reality behind the jokes (“Who is that? That’s your son.”) meant that he would spend the next few decades trying to repair these relationships. Much of the damage could not be undone. At age forty-seven, he was just beginning to take stock of his losses.”
The second thought I had when reading the CEO books is from Jeffrey Pfeffer, who wrote in Power that those books are great at glossing over the details of the journey to the top. CEO stories most often read like a smooth line from competence to performance to promotion.
That story is usually just a small part of the success. Pfeffer writes: “The research shows that intelligence is the single best predictor of job performance. However, intelligence is often overrated as an attribute that will help people obtain power. That’s because intelligence seldom accounts for much more than 20 percent of the variation in work performance in any event, and the relationship between performance and attaining power is equally weak.”
What’s usually missing from these stories is the presence of luck. The stories usually also leave out that a willingness to sacrifice more than everyone else (and far beyond anything “normal”), executing and/or surviving political power plays, and having powerful sponsors and connections were often part of the success story..
Susan Rice, for example, is certainly highly intelligent (“Academically, I found Stanford stimulating but not difficult.”) and accomplished (a Rhodes Scholar, Ph.D.). But she also knew her future boss Madeleine Albright because Albright and her mom both served on the board of the private primary school she attended.
Brad Stone’s history of Amazon, The Everything Store, paints a flattering picture of Jeff Bezos as highly intelligent and driven. But Bezos had a leg up from an almost $250,000 investment by his parents in the early days of the company.
And yes, Bill Gates is a genius, but the big break in the early days of Microsoft—being the operating system provider for IBM—was due to his mother. This CNBC article describes her role:
“Mary was a respected businesswoman with many responsibilities, including her membership on the board of nonprofit organization United Way of King County. There, she met the late John Opel, then-chairman of IBM, who also was a member of the United Way board. In 1980, Microsoft was a small, five-year-old firm and Mary saw an opportunity to help her son’s fledgling company by speaking with Opel…”
Why is this worth highlighting? Because we live in a world filled with public displays of accomplishment.
I often have discussions with leaders who compare themselves with these outstanding results, and enviously think, “I should be doing as well as them.” Unfortunately, this also sometimes results in questioning their own abilities.
But once we bring back the true story of others' success—which includes things we don’t control, strategies we are unwilling to use, and a life that’s not that awesome—it can help us ground ourselves in our own choices and power.
Adam Grant recently tweeted this very relevant lesson: “Picking someone as your role model in life sets unrealistic expectations. Eventually, you'll learn they don't belong on a pedestal. It's better to admire people for specific strengths. It reminds you they have weaknesses too. Knowing they have vices puts their virtues in reach.”
Leadership Wisdom + Something Fun
All that said, what’s great about these CEO books is that they include funny anecdotes. Some of my favorites:
“When I was connected to the secretary [Madeleine Albright], I started, ‘I am calling to report that I just gave the finger to a member of President Clinton’s cabinet.’ She laughed and asked for elaboration. I explained the back-and-forth, and she simply said, ‘Good for you!’”
— Susan Rice, in Tough Love
“The corporate model is male—white male—and always has been. We all start out with two arms and two legs and a head, but if you’re born white with testicles and a penis, you’re already way ahead of the game.”
— Ursula Burns, in Where You Are Is Not Who You Are
“[Warren Buffett] had a regular Saturday night reservation with Lou Battistone at Jimmy Lake’s theater, a local burlesque joint….. He spent twenty-five dollars on a 1920s-style raccoon coat. When he wore it down to Jimmy Lake’s, the bouncer told him, “No clowning around, you guys. Either take that coat off, or you can’t come in.” He took it off.”
— Alice Schroeder, describing what Buffett did when other teens were at parties in The Snowball
“At home, every activity was closely monitored. If we wanted to see a movie, my parents would insist they had to see it first, and they never seemed to have time to see movies—so we almost never went. We could go to the local lending library, a one-room structure a few blocks away with unlimited borrowing for a very low fee, but the books had to be returned the next day. (This is how I learned to speed-read!)”
— Indra Nooyi, in My Life in Full
(I’m totally taking that idea for use with our kids!)