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Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

A guy I used to work for once described his path to the top of a large company as, "being lazy enough to want to delegate everything, having enough experience in enough fields to know who to delegate to, and being smart enough to know what tasks are worth your time."

(That's paraphrased slightly)

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It's probably not going to be a popular sentiment around here, but other helpful factors are being tall, a full head of hair, and charisma. Unfortunately it often seems those qualities, while not the active ingredients in a good CEO, are the ones most often found in CEOs.

Also, have the luck to work on successful projects, as individual impact is impossible to measure.

Very true, although you can probably enhance luck with canny political wrangling and the like.

Seems like charisma would be pretty valuable for anyone delegating or making external deals.

It is, but it can unfortunately blind people to a lack of other qualifications. Of course, I don't mean that "charismatic people are unqualified". Obviously Steve Jobs was quite charismatic and did impressive things for his company. Bill Gates meanwhile, I like a lot more as a person, but I'd find it hard to argue for his "classical" CEO creds of charisma and imposing presence.

Charisma is hard to quickly measure and height might be a bit more work, but I sampled 10 of the CEOs of the largest German companies [0]. Most of them did _not_ have a full head of hair.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorstandsvorsitzender#Liste_de...

All men.

Correct. The post I replied to did not talk about possible gender issues, but about certain (physical) characteristics that CEOs supposedly have.

Germany also has a much longer tradition of promoting engineers rather than sales, marketing, and finance types.

This hurts to admit, but when I searched to find where I had gotten that idea... it was a survey on USA Today! I'm ashamed. In fact what I did find was a bunch of CEO's expressing a total willingness to be spear bald if it they could gain a few inches of height.

So please disregard the hair comment, I was wrong.

When I read about the hair, the first thing I thought of was Steve Ballmer. Then I thought of Jeff Bezos. Then Andreessen. Then Horowitz.

And then I came to this conclusion: you certainly don't have to be handsome to be a CEO! It is democratic in that way.

Of all of those, why am I positive that we're both imagining Steve Ballmer's shining face/pate? "Woooo!"

Like this [0] guy?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

Clear case of success via good looks.

Checks height 5'8" damn it. Well at least you have to admit that he's a latter day Adonis. Ok, maybe he's the exception that proves the rule?

Kidding aside, "not all" has to be implied in any broad description of a group like this. Bill Gates would be another example of someone who enjoyed incredible success without those qualities.

Both of those guys became CEO by founding the company. You want to look at CEOs who were hired/promoted to the role.

That's certainly true, and if you can, you should improve your first impressions (plastic surgery, fashion, and later genetic cosmetics I hopefully imagine). Of course charisma also includes a whole lot of other things (psych, NLP) and that is quite a rabbit hole, but a worthwhile one.

But for things you can't change, I wouldn't quite worry. Because you can't change it. There are too many things you can change, why worry about being taller?

For statistical analysis, you are absolutely right. For personal growth, that statistic is probably irrelevant.

That's pretty much true, and even when it isn't there's no way to tell except in hindsight. It's best to give your full effort and as you say, try to relentlessly self-improve, because that at least has some hope of working.

Unless you want to be a female F500 CEO, then you're out of luck, which is a sad thing to be saying in in this millennium.

Out of luck is a bit strong. 22 of the S&P 500 companies have a female CEO. While that's far from balanced, it's also far from "out of luck", IMO.

>Unless you want to be a female F500 CEO, then you're out of luck...

Of which, only 4 are female, and that's what I explicitly was talking about, as opposed to S&P. To be honest though, 4.4% of S&P CEO's, when women are a bit more than 50% of the population is almost as ugly as .8%.

About charisma, I found this book really useful: http://foxcabane.com/book/

He left out the part where one must have a ruthless commitment to the goals of the company (or less charitably, oneself) at the expense of people.

An example from Napoleon's life was Marengo [1]. One of his generals (Massena) was besieged by the Austrians in Genoa. Napoleon had to make a choice between rescuing him - as he had requested - or cutting off the main Austrian force led by von Melas which was making inroads towards France; he did not have enough men or time to do both. His decision to cut off von Melas paid off in eventual victory, the reappearance of "independent" Italy for the first time in centuries, and peace for France, but cost him the city and Massena's friendship, as the latter felt betrayed, raison d'etat be damned.

In another famous instance [2], he loaded grapeshot in canons and fired at massed French citizen in the streets of Paris to defend the Revolution from Royalists. His calculation was that if he slaughtered a few in a brutal manner, he'd shock the rest into retreat; he pulled it off, saved the revolution at the cost of only a few hundred lives, and was rapidly promoted thereafter.

In both cases, Napoleon's own interests were aligned with that of the country and its people. In other cases, such as choosing a policy of economic protectionism as a response to Britain's industrial revolution being too advanced to compete against, or reinstating the Catholic Church as the official state religion and making succession hereditary once again, one could argue they were not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marengo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Vend%C3%A9miaire

Sorry for not replying earlier, but we deployed an app to a big government department and I've been working an obscene number of hours.

This is a truly excellent response and I especially appreciate your examples. They illuminated two very important things to me:

1.) Sometimes, when we look back at our success or failures, we tend to attribute them to those things that are most favourable to us.

2.) Sometimes people who reach great heights get there at the expense of their friends or family. I would love to find some research on how divorce rates change depending upon career success.

Thanks again for your excellent comment!

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