In a nytimes article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19brooks.html?ref=opinion, the author describes a recent survey undertaken by Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen to understand what characteristics of CEO matter? 316 CEO's across America were interviewed and a detailed personality assessment of CEOs and their companies performance were carried out to determine correlation. My reservation about this is the standard problem in regression. How to control for the factors which may be indirectly affecting the performance of the company. Also no details of analysis have been present, so there may be questions about conclusions derived from the study.
But since this is published in a reputed news magzine like nytimes and hence we assume that there is some credibility for the conclusions, we do come across a very interesting view of what makes a good CEO which is against the current popular understanding. According to the article "What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to details, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours." It is about ability to emphasize on incremental gain rather than waiting for some exciting new breakthrough setting media in the frenzy.
In the course "Leadership skills", we studied about Level 5 leadership(http://www.imaginal.nl/articleLevel5Leadership.htm) which also explains that the most successful leaders are self effacing, builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. Manmohan Singh who is castigated repeatedly for being a weak leader will come in this category though he lacks in being resolute which is also a necessary criteria. And also he is a political leader where being charismatic is an important aspect of getting masses to listen and follow your policies.
If this becomes an accepted truth and HR recruitment starts leaning towards these characteristics in recruiting managers and CEOs, we will see higher insistence on excellent GPAs which arguably reflect the characteristics of doggedness and incremental efficiencies. Geeks are the one who look for big breakthroughs, boring guys get their heads in the books and study to get high grades.
One sad part is that the study also proves that "These sorts of dogged but diffident traits do not correlate well with education levels. C.E.O.’s with law or M.B.A. degrees do not perform better than C.E.O.’s with college degrees." So getting an MBA degree doesn't correlate with higher salaries but if I am aiming for middle management, will it help...
And always remember there are exception to rules...........
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