What Makes CEOs Successful?

From last month’s Harvard Business Review:  The CEO Genome Project, starting by analyzing 2,000 CEOs, and in detail 930 of them, on:

       What does make CEOs successful? After analyzing all of their data, the researchers found that roughly half of the candidates earning an overall 'A' rating in their database, when evaluated for a CEO job, had distinguished themselves in more than one of four management traits. (Only five percent of the weakest performers, meanwhile, had done the same.) The four were: reaching out to stakeholders; being highly adaptable to change; being reliable and predictable rather than showing exceptional, and perhaps not repeatable, performance; and making fast decisions with conviction, if not necessarily perfect ones.

PS:  The study also found that more introverts than extroverts tended to run successful organizations, but barely more.

Then, the in this month’s HBR:  Four Characteristics of Successful Performance by CEOs

1.  Deciding with Speed and Conviction

2.  Engaging for Impact

3.  Adapting Proactively

4.  Delivering Reliably

It gets confusing.