If you’re thinking about buying stock in a company and haven’t bothered to learn who the CEO is—well, friend, that’s like handing your car keys to a stranger and hoping they take you someplace nice.
We live in an age where people obsess over charts, earnings calls, and analyst upgrades, yet forget to ask the most important question of all: “Who’s driving this thing?” A company ain’t a spreadsheet—it’s a ship. And the captain’s name is carved into the helm. If you don’t know where that person has been, how they think, what they value, or whether they’ve run aground before… then you’re investing in a fantasy, not a business.
You see, a CEO doesn’t change all that much. A lawyer will lawyer. An engineer will tinker. A marketing guy will tell a story. They all have their favorite tools, and when the storm hits, they go back to what they know. That’s why, if you want to know where a company’s going, don’t just read the quarterly report—read the resume. Know the man or woman behind the curtain, because the numbers only tell you where they’ve been. The CEO tells you where they’re going. And if you ignore that? Well, you’re flying blind, son. And Wall Street don’t hand out parachutes.
Now I ain’t saying every CEO fits neatly into a box. Some are accountants with soul, some engineers who can sell, and yes—even the occasional lawyer who isn’t trying to outlaw the future. But most of the time, they follow a pattern. We all do. You give a carpenter a problem, he reaches for a hammer. You give a lawyer a company, he writes a policy. You give a vampire the keys… and don’t be surprised when the company ends up an empty husk.
So before you invest your hard-earned money, don’t just look at the ticker symbol—look at the person in charge. Ask yourself: Would I trust this guy to run a lemonade stand? Would I want to work for her? Would I let them babysit my dog?
Because business, like life, is personal. And in the end, it ain’t the numbers that steer the ship—it’s the hands on the wheel.
And that, dear reader, is why knowing the CEO isn’t just smart investing. It’s plain old common sense.
The Many Faces of the CEO: Archetypes, Patterns, and Personal Observations
When you get to be my age, you start realizing that life is full of patterns—like redheads are more fun, blondes aren’t the smartest, and brunettes are more mysterious. Of course, many would disagree, especially the blondes. Many of them are fake anyway, right? But anyway, that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about accountants, business majors, engineers, and techies, and how they, by being the CEO of a company, shape its future for better or for worse.
So why the hair analogy? Well, just like predicting behavior based on hair color is a fallacy—but not 100% untrue—predicting a CEO’s behavior based on their training and education is also not 100% accurate. But the pattern is always there. They go back to the roots. Once an engineer, always an engineer. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer. Once a marketing person, always a marketing person. And worst of all, once an accountant, always an accountant. They all have good and bad—none are perfect.
If I had a company to run and couldn’t find the right person, I’d go with what I call the 3C model—bring in three people from three different backgrounds to run the company together. Complementary, Collaborative, Contrarian.
The Accountant CEO: The Guardian of the Ledger
The CEO that’s an accountant is always looking at the numbers, both quarterly and yearly. He’s really not thinking five, ten years out. He’s really trying to maximize his ROI and his profit. He wants to pay down debt, consolidate operations, and all in all, he’s playing a defensive game. Now, you want one of these when the economy is doing badly or you know that your company’s products are noncompetitive.
But then—and I’ve been through this cycle myself in the tech business several times—this is when you needed to have invested before. Otherwise, you’re basically draining your company of its assets, its resources, its inventory, its intellectual capital, and working your way down to zero, just selling what you got. And sooner or later, you’re going to end up at zero.
There are also companies that manage this type of growth because they’re very capital-intensive businesses, and that 1% can kill because it’s so much money. So I’m not putting down the accountant as a CEO. I wouldn’t want to work for him. There’s no fun in working for a company run by an accountant.
By the way, the accountant drives a very boring car, like a beige Camry , which he’s analyzed to death as the best ROI possible.
The Sales & Marketing CEO: The Pitchman-in-Chief
If you’re in sales, you want a sales CEO. This is a guy who will do everything he can to make sure you get the sale. And he will give you the right products, packaged correctly, so that you can go out there and be successful as a salesperson.
If you’re an engineer, he’ll drive you crazy because he’ll keep changing the specs all the time. He won’t follow the rules. And he’ll drive you nuts. If you’re an accountant, he’ll drive you nuts too, because he’ll spend money on projects, cancel them, go on to the next thing. All the meantime, you’re the accountant trying to hold the place together and pay the bills, and you got a crazy CEO spending money like it’s going out of style, you’d think.
But in reality, he actually realizes the truth. In business, you either live or die by the products that you sell. So Steve Jobs was one of these. That’s why people invested in him. So you had a guy like Warren Buffett, an accountant—or a propeller head, as we call him—and he would invest in a salesperson because a salesperson CEO is crazy, but they’re the home run hitters. The drive sports cars.
The Business Major CEO: The Professional Manager
Now we got the CEO who is a business major. He went to school, never ran a business really, but he has an MBA, has a degree, studied all the mechanics of it, really never got his hands dirty.
Tell me how smart he is. Maybe he does get his hands dirty. Maybe he does learn the different things and he knows how to delegate. He also has connections and can build a very broad company if he’s wise. If he’s dumb, he’ll just run another mediocre company. It’ll probably be profitable enough, but it will never be a home run. It will be a base hitter.
Again, they’re not all like this—just the odds. You have to look at the track record. And usually by the second or third company that they run, they start getting it right because they realize their mistakes. They do learn. That is true. And they do evolve. And they’re not dumb. And they do have connections. If young they drive BMW, if older Mercedes Benz
The Vampire CEO: The Corporate Parasite
Here’s one you never thought of. The vampire as a CEO. I’ve seen a couple of these before. What they do is they go work for a company, and it doesn’t matter their background. They’ve been successful in life before, or at least that’s what the story says. But they’re really there just to suck as much money out of the company as they can.
Lavish expense accounts. They drive the fancy car, which the company pays for. They promise. They give big promises. And they’re after quarterly profits because that’s how they’re going to demonstrate that they need a raise and money—that they’re good for the company and that the company should keep spending money on them. They’re really nice things to slice bread, and they don’t care what they have to do, including cheat on the books.
They will modify the board and put their people in charge on the board so they can continue this process. And basically, the shareholders get cheated out of their cut because every penny the CEO spends in the company is not his money. It’s the shareholders’ money. And the CEO will live very well until the company realizes that it’s broke and the vampire sucked all the blood out of it. Nissan CEO was one of these. They drive a Mclaren.
The Family-Run CEO: The Dynasty Steward
The family-run business. And no, I don’t mean the mafia. I mean the Waltons, the General Atomics, and many other companies that you’d be amazed are run like a family business. The people there, the people that control the business, are all family. And they all pass it down to their children, or somebody like a children. They’re all trained in the same philosophy.
They both keep the money really tight to the chest. Not necessarily bad. Many of them are very successful. It’s not a criticism. It’s an observation. The only thing I don’t like about them is that usually I can’t invest in them because they’re a family business. I love, for example, General Atomics. Can’t buy shares. I can’t even find out exactly what their sales prices are. Their ROI must be out of control. But I can’t invest any money in it. They have a garage full of cars and drive a different one every day.
The Lawyer CEO: The Risk-Averse Ruler
The lawyer CEO. Well, unless you’re in the business of hiring talent, music, or running a law firm or some similar venture, most companies run by lawyers are total disasters. And the reason is they don’t like to take risks. They are very careful in what they do. And in life, you make money by taking risks, whether it’s building a port halfway across the world or weapons that you don’t know if anybody’s going to buy or investing in equipment and materials when nobody wants them and then reselling them, etc., etc., etc.
Risk and reward go tied together, and attorneys avoid risks. Again, it depends on the type of company. If you have a company like IBM and it’s being run by lawyers, you’re dead. Many of the cable companies, Internet providers are now run by lawyers. They don’t innovate. They try to squeeze every penny they can out of every stupid terms of service. Sooner or later, it does not lead to a growth industry. It leads in trying to maintain their profit and their living. Not good.
Lawyers. Don’t like them. Don’t want to work for them. Don’t want to be one. Don’t want to invest in one. Lawyers. My opinion of lawyers—I don’t want to publish it because I may get kicked out of the Internet. They have a fleet of cars at the office and get driven home.
The Engineer CEO: The Builder-in-Chief
Ah, the engineered CEO. Some things that can be wonderful. A lot of companies are very successful being run by an engineer, at least for a while. And that’s the problem. The engineer eventually runs out of ideas, eventually has to pay for his ideas. Eventually, the world goes beyond their ideas. I worked for the second largest computer company in the world, run by an engineer, Ken Olson. It was VAX Computer Systems. They did wonderful. 15 years. So they couldn’t anymore. Because they could not innovate themselves out of a box that they created for themselves. And the rest of the company had issues. Because it did not have a proper balance.
Perhaps it’s unfair to blame it all on the engineers. But I love working for an engineering company. I’m an engineer by training. Engineers like to overcomplicate things. And sometimes, or a lot of times, they don’t worry about ROI enough. Sooner or later, you always have to worry about the ROI. They drive a Tesla
The Activist CEO: The Missionary with a Megaphone
Now comes a new kind—something that’s almost hard to describe and harder to explain. I’m going to keep it short because, to be honest, I don’t understand them: the activist CEO. To me, honesty is the best policy. I don’t know if these activist CEOs are really honest with themselves and others. I don’t know if they’re being foolish or short-sighted or actually think they can change the world. I guess that depends on the individual person.
And generally speaking, I learned in business school that the whole point of running a company is to make money. You can change the world and make money at the same time. And that’s what true capitalism is, believe it or not. It’s a way you make money by changing the world. And I also believe in win-win. If you run a company and your clients benefit from it, the world can benefit from it, it’s positive for everyone. It is not a zero-sum game where business is not in business to hurt people. It creates jobs for people, for families, helps pay for the schooling of the workers’ children, and their 401k so one day they can retire.
Sure, a business has to have an ROI, but it does so much more. Now, the activist CEO—and again, I don’t know them that well—I may be wrong about what to say. Their goal is to pick a subject and say we’re going to change the world by doing this and it doesn’t matter how much money it costs, whether it makes sense or not, we’re going to do it. A lot of times they either fall for a scam or are a scam or they never get to do whatever they wanted to do, simply put, because it doesn’t work.
Just because you want water to be made out of the air doesn’t mean that the physics will allow you to do so in a reasonable, cost-effective manner. And you can spend billions of dollars building that technology, and it ain’t going to work, because the engineer will tell you there’s something called the conservation of energy, and it takes too much energy to turn air into water. Can you do it? Yes. Is it worth it? No. You’re much better off doing other things to get that water. Now, that’s until the technology changes, right? And we’ve seen that. But that’s the point. A lot of times, or most of the time, some of these activist ideas are beyond their top frame. I’ll give you a perfect example.
Electric cars, do they work? Yes. Do they work all the time? No. Hybrids are actually better. I’d rather invest in a hybrid than an electric car. Same thing with activist CEOs. I’d rather invest in one of the other ones. They drive a 10 year old Prius of course
Conclusion
These are all exaggerations and in good fun—but they’re meant to prove a point, not to be technically accurate under all circumstances. They’re patterns, not prophecies. And yet, in boardroom after boardroom, you’ll see these archetypes show up like old characters in new suits. No one is perfect. Each background brings strengths and blind spots.
If you want to build something that lasts, maybe the best bet isn’t one CEO—it’s three. Or better yet, a leader who knows who he isn’t, and surrounds himself with the ones who are.
Because in the end, the hair color might be fake, but the behavior usually isn’t.
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