>I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design.
Uh... that's not really a CEO's job though.
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Uh... that's not really a CEO's job though.
I haven't spent much time in a corporate environment, mostly in a workshop making structural steel, so it's not at all clear to me who the CxO layer does.
As another comment suggested their roles seem to be mostly decorative. Do these roles actually make decisions, or just sign off on them?
Basically, it's like this:
If your subordinates come to you and are like, "This is absolutely the right thing to do," then you'll 95% of the time sign off on it. If you find that that's not true, it's probably time to fire your subordinates, they apparently aren't doing a good job.
If subordinate A comes to you and says, "We should do X," and subordinate B comes to you and says, "We should do mutually exclusive thing Y," then you may need to decide between them.
CEOs should also ideally have a strategic sense and say things like, "Guys, I want us to look at doing something like thing Z. Research it and tell me your conclusions," when everyone else thought that there was no decision to be made at all -- just keep chugging along.
In that role, maybe they make lots of decisions, maybe they write things like "Part Deux", or maybe they stand around an scream a lot. Whatever works; probably a little of all of the above, and a good CEO knows when to use which approach.
At some level they may also report to a board, who helps them, or replaces them, all based on their execution success. And at another level, they report to shareholders who do the same.