HBR IdeaCast

What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job

31 min

In this episode of HBR IdeaCast, Nathan Noria, former Dean of Harvard Business School, discusses the common misconceptions new CEOs have about the role, emphasizing that they can no longer run the company directly but must empower their teams. He highlights the importance of staying connected to the truth through frontline employees, managing the complex relationship with the board, and maintaining a clear, agenda-driven focus on time and priorities. Key insights include the need for humility, the value of taking calculated risks earlier in one's career, and the discipline of deciding what *not* to do.

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✨ Key Takeaways

1

New CEOs are often surprised they can't 'run the company' directly; their job is to create conditions for others to succeed.
2

Information reaching the CEO is often 'sugar-coated' (like frosted cornflakes); the best leaders get truth by talking to frontline employees and customers.
3

Managing the board is like managing a complex boss of 10-12 people; many fired CEOs were blindsided because they mistook board politeness for support.
4

A CEO's most precious asset is their time; they should do a quarterly calendar review to ensure at least half their time aligns with their top priorities.
5

The 80% of the CEO job remains constant (agenda, team, strategy, culture), while the 20% involves responding to evolving external issues like geopolitics or AI.

💬 Notable Quotes

"Information arrives to the CEO as cornflakes, ends up on their desk as frosted cornflakes. So everything gets sugared up, everything looks a little bit sweeter for the CEO."

— Nathan Noria
"The definition of strategy is as much deciding what you're not going to do as deciding what you are going to do."

— Nathan Noria (citing a colleague)
"If you have even one weak link on your senior team, you're gonna get distracted into managing that person. You'll be watching over their shoulder. By the way, anybody whose shoulder you're watching over feels watched too. So they end up feeling insecure as well."

— Nathan Noria