315. How to Become a C.E.O.

Freakonomics Radio

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Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2018

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

Mark Zuckerberg's dentist dad was an early adopter of digital x-rays. Jack Welch blew the roof off a factory. Carol Bartz was a Wisconsin farm girl who got into computers. No two C.E.O.'s have the same origin story — so we tell them all! How the leaders of Facebook, G.E., Yahoo!, PepsiCo, Microsoft, Virgin, the Carlyle Group, Reddit, and Bridgewater Associates made it to the top. (Part 2 of a special series, "The Secret Life of C.E.O.'s.")

Transcript

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0:00.0	It is a very lonely job.
0:04.8	I wouldn't want it.
0:05.6	40 hour days, eight days a week.
0:07.6	And then boom, they make a decision and everybody's happy.
0:10.2	Everybody has some skeletons in their closet.
0:12.2	They really isn't a honeymoon period because you are the CEO.
0:19.0	Our CEO's born or made?
0:21.0	I'm pretty sure it's some combination of both.
0:23.6	You know, you look at the data and there's ten different recipes to success.
0:30.6	Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford, has been studying leadership for years.
0:35.6	No one could really give us a straight answer on what to find a good or a bad leader.
0:40.6	Sure, there are some people that are better than others, but it's damn hard to tell what it is.
0:44.6	We've been spending our time lately, interviewing the CEOs of companies like Microsoft and PepsiCo and Facebook.
0:50.6	You'd think there'd be some sort of a template for what makes a successful CEO,
0:55.6	some set of common characteristics, but as Nicholas Bloom and others have told us,
1:00.6	the data tell a different story.
1:02.6	It's very hard to pin down just what produces or predicts or even indicates a good CEO.
1:08.6	So today, I'm free economics radio, in the absence of great statistical evidence,
1:13.6	we'll go the anthropological route and ask the question,
1:16.6	how do you become a CEO? We'll track our CEOs from their beginnings through their ascensions,
1:23.6	including how they almost didn't make it.
1:25.6	I expected I might get fired.
	...

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