HN Explorer

Ask HN: Are CEOS nowadays too soft?

6 points by juxta ↗ HN
I was reading Steve Jobs biography and compared how him and Gates were cut-throat and sometimes downright rude. Nowadays it seems like young CEOs like Zuckerburg are kind of soft. What do you guys think? Is it because times have changed?

6 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 7.4 ms ] thread
plq
Assuming you mean "were cut-throat and sometimes downright rude [against employees]", I'd guess it's mostly because talent is much scarcer today than it was twenty years ago.
juxta
employees - yes but also to others as well. Steve Jobs was a dick to pretty much anyone he felt fit and said what was on his mind. I don't see that level of rudeness in CEOs nowadays (though i'm not saying this is a good or bad thing)
ryanlchan
The way the question is phrased makes it sound like you assume that being 'hard' is required to be a transformative CEO. I don't think this is true. A great CEO has many tools in his repertoire to motivate and influence people; cut-throat rudeness is only one of them.

One successful CEO described it to me as such: "If you're Steve Jobs, and you have that talent, you can be an asshole. For the rest of us though, you can't be an asshole, because no one wants to work with an asshole. People just want to do business with a good guy."

hansy
How is Zuckerburg a "soft" CEO?

Who else do you consider "soft" and why?

You have to remember that nowadays with ubiquitous social media, CEOs have to be extremely careful about how they act. It's possible Steve Jobs may have been an anomaly.

staunch
Steve got kicked out of Apple due to his behavior. Bill wasn't even in the same league of belligerence.

Very few people are quite as nasty as Jobs and even fewer have the other qualities that allow people look past it.

zepolen
In my experience, the better CEOs have vision, execution, charisma, massive egos, luck, high paranoia, no problem with selling out their mother to further their business and decisiveness or more bluntly, balls.

Gates, Jobs and Zuckerburg possess all those qualities in varying levels.

It's these things that let them do things that most people might view 'insane' today but in retrospect will be viewed as 'awesome'.

There are plenty of examples in history, and Zuckerburg's best one is probably turning down a billion dollars for Facebook in the beginning.

He had the vision, massive ego and balls to say No.