Review on Freakonomic's "How to Become a C.E.O."

“How to Become a C.E.O.” by Stephen J. Dubner is a Freakonomics podcast about how several highly different C.E.O.’s had come to be. There is no exact correlation between the history of all excellent C.E.O.’s that has been made. In the podcast recording they did, however, make a connection about the difference in successfulness based on whether a C.E.O. was internal or external to the company. The difference was that internal candidates made better C.E.O.’s and were over 25% more successful financial performance than external hires. The podcast also highlighted how important mistakes helped and taught the C.E.O.’s life lessons that eventually helped them develop into the successful C.E.O.’s that they were.

Something that interested me during the lecture was how usually entrepreneurs are almost never their company’s C.E.O. in the long run. Usually entrepreneurs do not make good C.E.O.’s because of their inability to successfully run a business. The textbook describes aentrepreneur as “someone who identifies a business opportunity and assumes the risk of creating and running a business to take advantage of it”, whereas a C.E.O. is solely responsible for making management decisions.
The class discussions that we’ve had so far have explained the importance of both the roles of the C.E.O. and the entrepreneur. Both roles are important in the business community and perform their own niches that benefit society. The podcast reconfirms the material that we learned in class along with providing statistics to back up conclusions, as well.



Comments