The Four

The operator is long on business maturity and reeks of integrity.
He or she must be highly competent at dealing with employees who
increasingly choose job security over risk, and who prefer salaries over
stock. This is the CEO who travels 250 days a year visiting far-flung
divisions, deals with angry shareholders, and is always on the hunt for
the next corporate acquisition. People who envy high-paid corporate
CEOs don’t know what they are talking about (other than the tens of
millions in comp); it’s one of the shittiest jobs in corporate life, which
is why certain sociopaths thrive at it.
If the employees and shareholders of an aging and declining firm
are lucky, they get a pragmatist in the chief executive’s chair. The
pragmatist CEO has no romantic notions about the company’s glory
days (mostly because he or she wasn’t there) and never falls in love
with the firm. Rather, the pragmatist CEO recognizes that the firm is
in decline and harvests the cash flows, cuts costs faster than revenue
declines, sells off still-valuable assets to mature company CEOs (never
to visionary CEOs, who don’t want the stink of death on their
companies), and then fire-sales the rest.
A productive exercise for one’s own career is to ask: Where do I
thrive in the alphabet? Think of companies and products having a life
cycle, A–Z. Are you happiest at start-ups where you’re expected to
wear a number of different hats (A–D), the inception/visionary stage
(E–H), good at managing, scaling, and reinventing (I–P)... or can
you manage a firm/product in decline, and do so profitably (Q–Z)?
Few people are good across more than several letters. This exercise
should help guide the firms and projects you work for and pursue.
Few CEOs are suited for more than two of the stages. Most CEOs
got to the position by being founders, visionaries, or operators, not
pragmatists. You can probably count the number of CEOs in American
business history who have effectively led their firms (or wanted to)
across the entire alphabet. After all, who wants to lead into death the
great company they founded decades before?
Kids born today in advanced nations have a life expectancy of one
hundred. Of the Dow 100, only eleven are more than one hundred
years old—89 percent mortality rate. That means our kids will outlive
almost all the firms you know today. Look at the list of the ten largest