So I work for a large bank in the United States. Me and my coworkers always joke that whenever something bad or inconvenient happens it’s the CEOs fault. Though it’s just a running joke it got me thinking, on a day to day basis what does a CEO actually do? I get the “Chief Executive Officer” nomenclature means they more than likely make executive decisions but what does that look like? Are they at their desk signing papers all day? Death by meeting?
Edit: Holy crap thanks for all the answers I feel like this sub always pulls through when I have a weird question. Thanks guys!
In: 1423
I work for a bank as well. The ceo hires a bunch of dipsticks that speak with big words, but don’t know a damn thing about actually making things work better.
I am the CEO of a startup.
Basically, imagine a business is a ship. There’s lot of people that run the ship, but there’s one guy in charge of everyone. His job is to oversee getting the ship to the destination (I.e the business strategy). Now he doesn’t tell the navigator how to run charts or tell the engineer how to manage the engines at a micro level. He just guides everyone at a high level towards the goal. Eg. Tells the navigator and engineer “let’s set a course north at 20 knots”.
Different people do this in different ways. My personal opinion is that a CEO should only be making a few big decisions and supporting everyone who makes all the other decisions.
I am a CEO of a 150 person company so take my answer with that perspective in mind. My job is mostly about:
– Setting the tone for our organizational culture. The most senior people in the business deeply impact the way people around them feel with their words and actions. One of our most important functions is to ensure that we are doing things that foster the kind of environmental tone that is conducive to great work being done efficiently.
– Deeply understanding and leading the strategy. I need to be very clear about what our purpose and current focus is as an organization so that I can constantly communicate how we should be thinking about things as we move forward as a business. When this is done right organisations tend to resonate with a clear vision and direction of travel. This process involves working closely with more specialized senior people, such as a CFO, CMO, CTO, etc. With the strategy in mind, we need to combine the shared insight of these senior experts and use it to make the right decisions that impact the organisation’s future.
– Overseeing general operations but only at a pretty high level. Understanding what key pieces of information to keep track of in any organization at a given time is a key requirement for a CEO to ensure that appropriate action can take place to avoid significant strategic risk and capitalize on opportunities.
– Understanding where we are as a business and where we are going. We need to have a view on the future and be able to reflexively understand how well our current state lives in that future. It is the CEO’s ultimate responsibility to ensure that a business effectively evolves with market/environmental demands.
There’s definitely more but I think that captures most of it.
The function of a CEO in Capitalism is to extract wealth from the corporation so that the working people in the organization are unable to become rich. Capitalism allows privatization of common wealth, ‘focussing’ the power and wealth into one person, and the board & Exec team (‘leadership teams’) are also allowed to have large salaries — but none match the CEO. The CEO’s package will be exorbitant and have amazing perks (private jet, paid residence, paid cars / drivers / security detail, paid trips & meals, sometimes money for fitness trainers / fashion consultants / coaches, and some CEO’s get sexual perks from assistants, massages, sometimes free drugs (I only know of a few of those, including WeWork CEO), and the list goes on and on.
Generally the CEO’s performance may not be tied to their compensation, but nowadays the trend is to pay the majority with company stock to incentivize the CEO’s to actually give a crap.
In contrast, a cooperative organization would have to battle the Capitalist legal system to distribute wealth among the workers and not a leadership / executive team. If the cooperative had shareholders, they could force the co-op to limit worker pay to maximize shareholder returns. Capitalism does not want co-ops to succeed.
What do they actually do? Whatever the fuck they want, bc they are the RICH ELITE 1% that are fucking up our 2023 Earth.
Everyone mentions CEOs being in constant meetings, so how do things like Elon Musk being CEO of three companies work? Likewise, Crow, the guy who absolutely did not bribe Justice Thomas, was able to take his good friends on week long cruises or retreats out into his private luxury compound. Every description makes this sound like a job that you can maybe take a single day off from, at best, that things break without the CEO at the helm constantly pushing things forward.
Not ELI5 but check out the Freakonomics episodes [What Does a C.E.O. Actually Do?](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-does-a-c-e-o-actually-do/) and the two other ones in the series ([https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-become-a-c-e-o/](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-become-a-c-e-o/) and [https://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-wasnt-stupid-enough-to-say-this-could-be-done-overnight/](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-wasnt-stupid-enough-to-say-this-could-be-done-overnight/)).
In simple terms, a CEO doesn’t do work, he just makes important decisions.
He doesn’t need to fill excel sheets with company data. He’s got people for that.
The CEO just decides the companies next steps and future work. He has people that calculate for him how much a new factory in Vietnam will cost and he decides if the company will open a factory there or if producing local will be better in the future
CEO’s with large corporations, regardless of their abilities, get are ridiculously overpaid. This is especially true when deciding the direction a company will skew, it’s often half luck, half insight. So when asked what they do, in part, they gamble with stockholders investments.
I had a CEO tell us what he does. He told us, our customers do not pay me, they pay you (our company is in the IT Services industry). It is my job to make sure you can do your job efficiently and with great quality.
So, he said, what should I do?
He actually listened and some of the requests were fulfilled.
The company is a ship. The CEO is the captain. The captain doesn’t decide what the mission is. The captain is in charge of making it happen.
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