This is interesting, but there are so many things that can be at work that I'm not sure how much you can draw from this. For one, boards may elect CEOs that are good for what they need at that moment - when a company needs to handle a large merger, they may choose someone with experience in doing that for that industry and their talents may never be fully utilized after that. And a CEOs performance isn't likely to be homogeneous over time either - they may get better or worse over time. I guess your basic problem is that CEOs aren't selected by a random process. So if a board of directors always did a good job choosing the right CEO, why would you expect there to be big, statistical differences anyway?

I'm not also terribly clear on what sort of strength of effect the authors are looking for. A lot of people work for a company, are they trying to attribute all of a company's earnings to a single person? Or are they looking for a difference that is not very proportionate to what CEOs actually do.

I should also point out that "could be due to chance" isn't in itself very interesting. That means that with the methods and data the authors happened to use, they didn't happen to find a statistically significant effect, and while that could be because they don't have an effect it could also be that the tools used to look for one were simply not up to par.

That said, it's my understanding (and some experience) that the upper echelons of a lot of companies can be... a bit incestuous, cliquey, who-you-happen-to-know.

I've long called this the "Dr. John Theory of CEO's" - I was in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time.

Take McDonald's for example. Their stock was up a bunch yesterday on nice earnings, and everyone cheered that the new CEO's turnaround was seeing results. Yay! Except this is a global company with over 30,000 stores, and the new guy had only gotten the job in March. And magically, he gets 100% credit for the good news, even though all he can reasonably do as the CEO is tinker around (eg Egg McMuffins all day - yippee). Ditto Ruth Porat at Google, same thing. She had been on the job for all of seven weeks when Google reported great earnings, and when results were good everyone was like, "ZOMG RUTH IS INCREDIBLE!!" Or Marissa Mayer...the list is endless.

It's almost comical how lazy people are at attributing success and failure to executives who simply showed up at the right time and took credit for the inevitable.

Horrible CEOs absolutely can destroy value. Does anyone seriously question that?

Some level of "good" is probably table stakes. There's a lot of randomness then, especially for non-founder CEOs.

So 400x pay ratios are the modern day equivalent of sacrificing a lamb in the hope the gods will bring good fortune?

I spent about 12 years as an employee in companies of various sizes in different industries. Purely anecdotally, I can tell you that sh*t rolls downhill. Bad people at the top make for unhappy teams and poor performance. The opposite is also true. The CEOs I respected most also inspired their teams to achieve the fastest growth.

Ha! This is the opposite of my hypothesis that I blogged about a few days ago: Founder-CEO's outperform non-founder CEO's.

https://medium.com/nick-tommarello/my-strategy-for-investing...

Most of success in business are due to chance, contrary to popular myths.

But character matters also, it is, perhaps, second most important variable, but chance outweights everything. That's why people are saying that chance favours the prepared.

CEO compensation is as much voodoo as the compensation of managers of actively managed funds. They're all geniuses in up markets, but only a tiny minority beat the indices in the long haul, never mind being worth their fees.

Re headline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGTKN0DaxzQ

Usually more about the team, culture, motivating employees, marketing, and operations. CEO had little to do with any of this in almost every place I've ever worked.

Just a mathematical question : can we systematically distinguish randomly distributed luck from randomly distributed competence ‎?

Many here are misuderstanding "firm performance" with employee quality of life( that's fair!).

But, from the "shareholder value" perspective this might actually be true. Some despicable CEOs may actually be just as good as a friendly and passionate founding CEO

surprise ratio: 0%

its very RARE that CEOs make the company succeed or fail. some do, either way, from time to time, of course.

most are just here gathering money and 'n attempting to figure out what their job is all about.

Large efforts have a momentum that few people can singlehandedly overcome. And at that level, the kinds of effect you can have are of a different order.

Number one, you need a growing market to have outstanding performance, either you are creating one out of another one or hitching a ride. Doesn't matter who is running it.

After that though I think CEO has an incredible impact on the business. They set the vision and culture and hire the leaders. If CEOs were just chance, there wouldn't be so many companies with transition issues.

There's one confounding factor I wonder about.

If a company, at some point, has a great long serving CEO or founder, that person will have great influence on choosing their successor. They will also have influence on who is on the board of that company. So there may be a virtuous circle called "culture" at that company.

Could that not make it look like the CEO statistically doesn't matter?

Then why is the CEO the highest paid person ?

A CEO is only as good as the people below them, and the people below them, and so on...

How about right person at the right time?

Well Duh!!!!

Just like there are good and bad managers, there are also good and bad CEOs. The only difference I see between the two is that a bad manager when fired is basically given a meager severance package and a CEO walks away with millions.

Obviously wrong.