WTF Do CEOs Actually Do All Day?

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2023Aug 23

The State of AI in Marketing in 2023: https://clickhubspot.com/jip ----- Sign up for my FREE newsletter! - https://www.compoundeddaily.com/ Support me on Patreon - / howmoneyworks ----- My Other Channel: @howhistoryworks Edited By: Andrew Gonzales Music Courtesy of: Epidemic Sound Select Footage Courtesy of: Getty Images For sponsorship inquiries, please contact sponsors@worksmedia.group Sign up for my newsletter https://compoundeddaily.com 👈 All materials in these videos are for educational purposes only and fall within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. This video does not provide investment or financial advice of any kind. ----- A good CEO can build an average company into a billion-dollar success, and a bad CEO can destroy even a strong company in less than a year. With so much on the line shareholders happily pay these privileged men an women millions of dollars every year for their services. But they are still just employees, they come to work every day and go home like everyone else. So what do these people actually do all day? The real answer to what a CEO actually does is… whatever they want. Within the company they are only answerable to the board of directors and the only power that board of directors has over them is to decide their compensation package, or to fire them. The board of directors themselves are representatives of the companies’ shareholders and in a lot of small companies the biggest shareholder and the chairman of the board is also the CEO so the board can’t do anything apart from give advice and hope the CEO listens to it. That’s only for small companies though, it is INCREDIBLY rare for the CEO’s of public companies to have this much power, in fact there is only ONE company in the S&P500 where the CEO can not be voted out by the board and that’s META’s Mark Zuckerberg since he owns a majority of a special type of share in the company. For every other CEO their only real job is to not get fired by the board. The best way to do that is to keep the board that represents the shareholders happy by delivering strong investment returns. Make line go up is a simple objective but it still doesn’t answer what they actually do all day since that goal can be achieved in so many different ways, but I have to make this video before Good Work makes a funnier, better version of it… again… So let’s imagine that you wake up one day in the body of a random Fortune Five Hundred CEO and you need to make it though the day without being found out, here are the things that ONLY a CEO can do from the moment they you walk into the office until the moment you leave… probably quiet late at night… The first task that ONLY a CEO is allowed to perform in a large company is to chose the direction the company will take. As CEO only you can decide if your company will acquire another company, introduce a new product range, focus on growth or cutting costs, open in a new country, or just keep things running exactly as they are. A good CEO should talk with the board, their employees, and occasionally outside consultants before making these decisions. As a CEO talking to these parties can alert your to risks that you have overlooked or better opportunities to pursue instead. As a CEO there are different ways to get this feedback, some try to be as hands on as possible, they will talk directly to customers, do their own sales calls and work weekends at stores. Other CEOs decide what to do based on financial statements and the advice of the senior managers that pass feedback up the corporate hierarchy. The first type of CEO normally get’s more praise from being a hands-on manager that really knows their business, but both styles have pros and cons. A CEO that spends too much time performing low level business operations can get too concerned with details. A hands on CEO can only manage a company so large before their style of management becomes incompatible with getting the information they need to make good decisions. No matter what approach you chose to take, as CEO you are still the only person that can decide the direction of the company, are you going to rebrand to X.com? Are you going to remove a headphone jack from your flagship product? Are you going to pivot from selling books to selling everything? The average CEO does not make that many big decisions in a day… they often don’t even make that many big decisions in their entire career, but they do spend a lot of their time every day talking to people whose opinions they value, so when they DO need to make decisions, they can make the best ones possible. But making decisions that could change the course of an entire company’s future is just the first thing that a CEO needs to do when they get to work, and the other three tasks don’t get any easier. So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out what (good) CEO’s actually do all day.