CEOs require passion above all


Before startups were cropping up every second, being a CEO meant that you had years of experience either at your company or within your industry. If your company is in trouble, it’s up to you as the CEO to take the heat from investors and do what’s best for your company. The CEO title is undoubtedly highly sought-after, but with this position also comes an enormous amount of responsibility.

But now, startups — from one-man startups to small teams — give founders or early employees another, perhaps easier, way to label themselves as a CEO.

Michael Jones, the former CEO of Myspace and current CEO of Science.com, has a lot of experience advising and being at the helm of both large and small companies. As someone who knows the pressure and challenges of being a CEO, Jones believes that the title should be differentiated based on role and company culture.

“To do [the title] justice — and to really classify the individuals who use the title — it is probably worth either dividing it into segments relating to the size of the company, or the skill set of the CEO,” Jones said. “For instance, I would consider Rupert Murdoch a classic CEO — more organizationally and financially focused than creatively. Contrary to that, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs are more product/consumer-minded CEOs — less organizationally focused but much more creative in nature.”

But even with different categories, the people who end up serving as CEOs of the top-performing companies still tend to be somewhat homogeneous.

According to CEO.com, 98 percent of CEOs at these companies are male, 97 percent are married and 99 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree. Approximately 79 percent of these CEOs had the backing of their companies as they were promoted within their company, while 17 percent were hired from the outside and only 4 percent were founders.

Considering the fact that the odds of becoming a CEO at a Fortune 500 are very unlikely for most people in the first place and even more so if you’re a woman or didn’t end up graduating college, the title becomes something even more desirous. Rising to this challenge is the first step, and for many, the chance to beat the odds is what keeps self-starters going.

In her experience creating and founding new platforms, projects and companies since she was an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley, Nanxi Liu has accrued an enormous amount of knowledge and experience from her accomplishments. As a student, she built CrimeFighter, an Android app to help report on-campus crime; Nanoly, a biotechnology company that was a recipient of The Dell Social Innovation Awards and had a one-on-one meeting with Steve Wozniak himself.

Currently, Liu is the CEO of Enplug, the first company to build platforms for real-time advertising. Despite the fact that Enplug is not a large corporation (yet), with all of the work that Liu has put into not only her company, but also everything she’s done leading up to this position, it’s safe to say that she has put in as many, if not more, sleepless nights and long days as the next CEO.

For Liu, being CEO is contingent upon your passion for and knowledge of the company.

“At a startup, being CEO means that you are the best sales person in the company,” Liu said. “Being CEO means that you know more about the company than anyone else. Therefore, you can see three steps ahead of anyone else … and use that foresight into making the best decisions.”

But what about people who are CEOs for the wrong reason? Looking back at the statistics, it’s not surprising that the number of people (17 percent) hired from the outside to be CEOs is so low. Sometimes the best CEOs are also the most devoted to the business, even if they might not have years and years of experience.

Josie Baik, a current MBA student at USC and the CEO of cyPOP, an interest-centric social network, served as President of her startup while she was still a student at the University of Washington, but despite the amount of homework or tests she had, she was constantly promoting cyPOP and meeting new people through the company.

Through Twitter, in fact, she’s been able to grow an extremely devoted following. If you’ve ever followed or interacted with Baik through Twitter, chances are that you’ll soon associate her with cyPOP.

“We definitely have people signing up [for cyPOP] from Twitter … half from me and half for cyPOP in general,” Baik said.

Because Baik’s individual efforts and passion for the startup has helped it grow, she has taken on a larger role at cyPOP.

“It was only recently, after a lot of effort, that I and my team felt that I was ready to take on the title of CEO and be truly responsible for executing on my personal vision,” Baik said.

Unlike Baik, however, there are many people who still take on the position just for the prestige. I can’t tell you how many high schoolers I’ve seen proclaim themselves CEO or founder of a blog or a club on campus just for college applications. And sure, the fact that salaries for CEOs of bigger companies are fairly big does not help this case. But if you are ever presented with the opportunity to become CEO only for the title and the money — don’t. Your lack of passion for the company will eventually surface as it did for Tony Hayward, ex-CEO of BP, and many others like him.

But in the end, because a CEO’s responsibilities really depend on how the company is structured and its size, should there be distinctions made in the CEO title? Though the CEOs of Snapchat and IBM are both very busy people, it can go without saying that the latter CEO probably has a lot more to oversee.

“For me, the title has become so watered down, I am not sure what it really means now beyond the fact that someone titled CEO is the operational decision-maker for the company,” Jones said. “Reasonably, I think everyone would benefit from clarity if we gave some sort of leveling to the title — i.e. a first Degree CEO, second Degree CEO — something that indicated the mass of the army the CEO commands, or the enterprise value represented by the CEO’s decision.”

So according to Jones, anyone can have the title. Whether or not it actually means anything, however, is up to the company.

 

Sara Clayton is a junior majoring in public relations. Her column “Tech Today” runs Tuesdays.

Follow Sara on Twitter @saraclay15

1 reply
  1. Keith Bailey
    Keith Bailey says:

    Nice article Sara. USC afforded me a nice education, but not much about running a company. I like to think the CEO is the head cheerleader for the company. The Great Recession was a proving ground for the most capable execs… Steering a company through hard times is much much more difficult than riding the market or spending easy money.

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