14 The People
newspaper and magazine stories tend to simplify the issues by concentrating on single events or single flaws and do not provide a holistic view. Book authors, in contrast, have more time for research and more space to tell the story. As a result, some books do provide a balanced picture of the right attributes, and many book-length biographies and analyses present case studies illustrating effective CEO performance.
The flaws summarized in the following subsections are, in effect, the reverse of the virtues listed above. Since no one is perfect, the CEO is likely to exhibit at least one of these flaws to some degree. How the start-up deals with a CEO's flaws is very important, because a company that is weak in other dimensions may find these flaws to be fatal. A flawless CEO is a rare phenomenon; however, Ken Olsen1 (Rifkin and Harrar, 1988) comes as close to this ideal as any CEO with whom I have worked, and his record of success is legendary.
Low Energy, Low Intelligence, and/or Low Integrity
The CEO may have either a low energy level (slow clock) or an inadequate time commitment, low intelligence (what might, in computer lingo, be termed a slow central processing unit, perhaps coupled with a small 640K memory), and/or questionable ethics. This type of CEO tolerates nonegalitarian behavior, low quality standards, poor work habits, and unrestrained company spending.
The criticality of the CEO as the standards setter-the individual who establishes the company's clock-was discussed earlier. Almost all the dimensions encompassed in this flaw, ranging from intelligence and work habits to ethics, have come up in "judging" every CEO I know. A particularly annoying flaw for start-ups is the CEO who treats the fledgling company as if it were a large, solidly established firm, demanding all the perks. Individuals of this sort are readily identifiable, since they insist on a large salary, absolutely must fly first class, require a carte blanche expense account, and tend to be found quibbling over (or modifying) their original compensation agreements with the company. Arrogance and greed drive such CEOs to milk the very firms they were hired to nurture.
My own biases are clear: only become part of a venture led by a hardworking, extremely intelligent, and highly ethical individual who knows how to establish a dynamic, open company culture and can manage, lead, and sell.
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1. Digital Equipment Corporation started in 1957 and ran well under Ken Olsen's leadership until the mid-1980s, when the advent of other forms of computing began to stall the company. Product revenues for 1990 declined from the previous year, and in the fourth quarter, the firm was unprofitable.