I'm Alison Beard.

And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Adi, if I asked you the top three things that a CEO or senior leader needs to do to be successful, what would you say?

Three things. Okay. So one has to be to be able to communicate a vision. Another has to be the ability to execute on strategy. And then I guess

the third would be to have the empathy to connect with staff to be able to hire and retain top

talent. Yeah, I think I would say something along the same lines, you know, setting the direction,

making the most important decisions, and hiring good people to do the rest, you know,

because we know delegation is a big part of being a leader and you can't micromanage.

But today's guest, Scott Cook, the co-founder and former CEO of Intuit, who is now its

executive committee chair,

offers a bit of a counterpoint. He says that in a lot of organizations, success actually

depends on senior executives caring not just about what is being worked on, but also on how

it's getting done. And he argues that you do have to dig into the weeds of execution

pretty routinely to make sure that everyone's following the same process.

And he has examples from not just into it, but several other companies in different industries.

I mean, it reminds me there's not just one way to run a company effectively.

And this sort of top-down approach has obviously served a lot of companies well.

But something has to give, right? So I assume at the end of the day, this is a prioritization question. Yeah, it's a balance, right, between the big picture and the nitty-gritty. And Cook and his co-author, Nathan Noria, they have a playbook for how to find that balance. They wrote the HBR article, The Surprising Success of of Hands on Leaders, and in today's episode, Scott will outline those best practices.

Here's my conversation with Scott Cook.

So there is this prevailing view that the job of the CEO at a business of size, mid to large size, is to focus on vision and strategy and building a great team and then to trust that team to do the execution.

So why is that wrong or at least not entirely right?

I think it's well-founded in that what you want to avoid is where the CEO of a larger

...