320. Letting Go

Freakonomics Radio

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you're a C.E.O., there are a lot of ways to leave your job, from abrupt firing to carefully planned succession (which may still go spectacularly wrong). In this final episode of our "Secret Life of a C.E.O." series, we hear those stories and many more. Also: what happens when you no longer have a corner office to go to — and how will you spend all that money?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is ludicrous, is boring and tedious.
0:05.5	What's pretty depressing?
0:07.5	You are looked at differently.
0:09.0	The first thing you have to do is basically get new friends.
0:11.0	These hard decisions, not something that you can delegate.
0:15.0	They're still way overpaid.
0:16.0	From day one, you are the CEO.
0:19.0	There's pretty much one way to come into this world, but a lot of ways to leave it.
0:34.0	There are good deaths, like dying peacefully in your sleep and old age and your own bed.
0:40.0	Bad deaths, sudden, tragic or brutal.
0:44.0	You can die by accident or on purpose from a common cause or a rare one.
0:49.0	Also ambivalent deaths and undramatic but nonetheless sad deaths.
0:54.0	Like I said, a lot of ways to go.
0:57.0	It struck me now that we've reached the end of our secret life of a CEO series.
1:03.0	But the same could be said for CEOs.
1:05.0	There are a lot of ways to go.
1:07.0	Some of the CEOs we've been speaking with, they went the hard way for sure.
1:11.0	They thought, well, we'll just fire Carol.
1:14.0	The board didn't have a stomach for it and that ended up being the reason why they asked me to leave.
1:21.0	Others have stepped down on their own terms in their own time.
1:25.0	When I undertook the process of transitioning, I said, well, I think that this is going to go quick maybe two or three years.
1:32.0	And there's been a lot of in between.
	...

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