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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977

> the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams

Wouldn't the CEO be... you know... the chief executive?

Sure, and the reason he is is because he DOES check stuff like this before sending it out.

Top leaders excel because they assemble a team around them they trust. You can't do everything yourself, you need to delegate. And having people in those positions also means you shouldn't be acting alone or those people will not stick around

I disagree. In a crisis, a leader should take the lead and make decisions. If he/she is not able to that on their own, they are in the wrong place.

Now I will agree that there are many executives like the ones you describe. But they are not top leaders.

So you’re telling me a CEO must also be a practicing lawyer? Because any other option is how you guarantee your company gets sued into oblivion.

First of all, I would expect a top leader to be prepared for scenarios like this (including templates of customer communication).

And yeah, I would expect a CEO to have enough legal knowledge to handle such a situation (customer communication) on his own.

But I also have to mentioned that I'm not in the US. Not every country has the litigation system of the US where you can basically destroy a company because you as the customer are too dumb to not spill hot coffee over yourself.

> you as the customer are too dumb to not spill hot coffee over yourself

presuming you're referring to the hot coffee lawsuit, maybe read details of the story. McDonalds wasn't at all blameless, and the plaintiff had reasonable demands

You expect the CEO of a company to have the legal depth of knowledge AND knowledge of all their customers, contracts and SLAs to be able to wing a communication and not somehow trip over all of that? They also should understand every possible legal jurisdiction that could be affected? You realise even the head of their legal department (a HIGHLY competent lawyer) likely wouldn’t say there could do that without speaking to the key people in their team?

Should the CEO also bang out some dev estimates for the roadmap because, hey, they should be competent enough to do something like that. Why not submit the accounts for the year? How hard can it be, just reading a few lines off their Sage or Quickbooks accounts?

Let me be more clear on what I mean by “wing it,” because “having templates” doesn’t really cut it. Anyone can bang out a “we have a problem” template, so why does the CEO need to attach their name to it? Once you’re at the point of needing a CEO to communicate, you have a specific problem, with its own specific impacts that a single person can not be expected to have enough depth of knowledge in their brain to actually talk about without involving their domain experts, including legal, technical, whatever the situation needs.

> can not be expected to have enough depth of knowledge in their brain to actually talk about

What is the use of a CEO if not to have enough depth of knowledge about the different aspects of running a business?

Like what? Poor little CEO that doesn't understand anything about the world and how to run a company. Seems like helplessness is expected at every stage.

> What is the use of a CEO if not to have enough depth of knowledge about the different aspects of running a business?

Bit of a difference between “having depth of knowledge in their business” and “can speak off-the-cuff with the necessary accuracy to remain in compliance with every contract and legal jurisdiction their organisation is engaged in, without consulting the numerous domain experts they employ for just this purpose,” isn’t there.

Also, such a situation that requires the CEO’s direct attention has already gone FAR beyond your standard incidents where you can throw out a pre written statement. Do you want your organisation just cuffing it from the top down? Are you Elon Musk in disguise?

What use is a CEO if they can't take the lead in times like this?

If they are unprepared frankly they suck as CEO and should be thrown out. If only competency was a requirement for these jobs...

That’s not what I said though, is it?

Take the lead couldn't be more different than act by themselves.

Take the lead, yes they should be able to as that's the job pretty much.

Act by themselves, sure they can make decisions in small cases. But on big things you hear everybody's input, weigh it, and only if needed, cast the deciding vote.

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