Exactly. I’ve never understood this criticism. A good CEO (in terms of the business) is able to make significant, groundbreaking decisions but is also able to reverse course quickly if those decisions aren’t working out (anyone remember the Facebook phone)?
Unless the CEO is psychic, they’re necessarily going to make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. The key is being able to recover quickly and move on to the next thing. A bad CEO makes no big decisions for fear of being wrong.
When FB bought Instagram for $1B, there were a lot of talk show hosts riffing on Zuckerberg for making one of the stupidest business decisions of all time. A lot of executives who got to their position by corporate ladder climbing have personalities that would be terrified of that sort of widespread criticism. They would never make the kinds of decisions that might possibly put them in the unenviable position of being made fun of on national television.
The assumption that hierarchical organizations are inevitable blinds us to more effective ways of organizing. When we look at companies today, their feudal-like structure means CEO decisions naturally have outsized impact - but this is a product of the system, not inherent necessity.
Take Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp under Zuckerberg. While these proved strategically valuable, framing them as evidence of unique CEO insight misses a crucial point: Many others in the organization likely would have made similar choices given the same position and information. The success stems more from the concentrated decision-making power than from individual brilliance.
What's fascinating is how we conflate organizational structure with individual capability. When good outcomes emerge from hierarchical systems, we rush to credit the person at the top rather than examining how the structure itself shapes and amplifies their decisions. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: hierarchical success is used to justify more hierarchy.
But imagine if we distributed decision-making power more broadly, tapping into the collective intelligence and diverse perspectives of entire organizations. Research on collective intelligence and successful worker cooperatives suggests groups often make better decisions than individuals, especially on complex issues. Companies like Valve and Morning Star have demonstrated that flat organizations can be both innovative and profitable.
The real opportunity lies in reimagining organizational structures that harness our full human potential - not just that of a select few at the top. By questioning our assumptions about hierarchy, we open ourselves to discovering more dynamic, equitable, and effective ways of working together.
This is a common refrain I've seen on HN when this topic has come up before, but there's a problem with it. The is a huge difference between (1) "flat organizations can work" and (2) "groups make better decisions than individuals, and this disparity is even larger on complex issues."
If #2 is true shouldn't an organization like Valve run circles around every single competitor it has since they're all dinosaurs with hierarchies and Valve isn't?
I think questions about whether a CEO is "good" or not are kind of impossible to answer, because you can't test the answers. All we can observe is the current reality and the decisions they've already made. There is no way to observe the other alternate universes where Zucc didn't buy Instagram, and/or the universes where he bought something else. Did the company do better or worse in those universes? No way to know.
Also, sometimes people say things like "Only [ceo's name] could run [company]. Look at their results!" This is just survivor bias. Who could know whether someone else could or couldn't run Facebook (or Tesla, or whatever)? Who can say with certainty that out of the 8+ billion people on the planet, only one particular guy could run the company, and that particular guy happened to be the guy who indeed ran it? What an improbable coincidence!
Not being able to test alternate universes sans Instagram acquisition doesn't mean that it's not impossible to tell whether a CEO is good or not, you just have to make a qualitative argument for why they are or not.
Buying IG was a good move because it has paid back Facebook's shareholders multiple orders of magnitude. Isn't the goal of the CEO to steward the company and to make shareholders returns (wether public or private)?
Unless the CEO is psychic, they’re necessarily going to make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. The key is being able to recover quickly and move on to the next thing. A bad CEO makes no big decisions for fear of being wrong.
When FB bought Instagram for $1B, there were a lot of talk show hosts riffing on Zuckerberg for making one of the stupidest business decisions of all time. A lot of executives who got to their position by corporate ladder climbing have personalities that would be terrified of that sort of widespread criticism. They would never make the kinds of decisions that might possibly put them in the unenviable position of being made fun of on national television.