The Six Responsibilities of an Outstanding CEO

Why This Topic Matters

The success of any company ultimately depends on one person, yet the job of general director—or CEO (Chief Executive Officer)—is not taught in universities or business schools. The best recent book on this subject is "CEO Excellence," written by three senior partners at McKinsey, the world's most respected consulting firm. The authors set out to answer a simple question: what distinguishes the CEO of an outstanding company from a merely good one?

To answer it, they studied data on roughly 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 companies and conducted in-depth interviews with 67 top leaders who survived that selection process. Their central finding was that top CEOs are usually exceptionally strong in a few areas, sufficiently competent in all the others, and—critically—have no glaring weaknesses. This echoes a broader leadership principle: develop your strengths, know your weaknesses, and bring those weaknesses up to a minimum acceptable level so they no longer harm your work.

The ultimate conclusion is that a CEO's job is not to become a super-expert in strategy, finance, marketing, HR, or operations. Their real task is to build a system in which all these elements work together. In other words, a CEO is first and foremost the architect of the company's operating system. From this foundation, the book identifies six core responsibilities of a CEO.

1. Setting the Direction for the Company

A true CEO must have a clear answer to where the company is headed—not merely react to market shifts, competitor moves, or external events, but actively define the business's course.

The key idea here is "be bold." Outstanding CEOs constantly search for opportunities to change the scale, the rules of the game, or the direction of their company. Mediocre CEOs simply defend the current state of the business, turning strategy into a list of minor incremental improvements rather than anything groundbreaking—captured by the common refrain of "next year we'll do the same thing as last year, just a bit better."

Real examples of bold bets:

• At a lighting equipment company, the team noticed that no city outside Moscow with a population over a million had Class-A shopping centers yet. Rather than continuing to treat retail-store lighting and shopping-center lighting as separate, disconnected markets, they committed to a dedicated shopping-center department—hiring a manager and accepting a full year of salary cost with no guaranteed return. By the second year, the investment paid off and became a consistent profit driver.
• At a hotel and restaurant furniture company, repeated client requests for landscaping of public spaces revealed an opportunity. The company poached the commercial director from the market leader in that niche, placed a serious bet, and funded a separate budget. After two years of investment, this internal department grew into its own business and became the country's top public-space landscaping company.

The research backs this up: CEOs who made at least one big bet per year (most made two or three) saw measurably higher revenue and profit growth. The core lesson: every unit of resource kept in a historically familiar but weak area of the business is a unit that could have become a growth engine multiplied many times over. A useful self-check question: can you state in one sentence what strategic bet your company is making for next year?

2. Aligning the Organization's Operational Processes

A CEO must constantly ask: is my organization actually functioning as a system right now? Many CEOs think in terms of revenue, profit, sales systems, and investment volumes, controlling these as individual blocks—but they often underestimate company culture, the role of specific individuals, and how people interact with each other. You can have the right strategy and still lose simply because the organization is incapable of executing it.

A company is a complex, interconnected organism, and this was illustrated by an experience opening a new department at a publishing house. The market opportunity was validated, funding was available, and an experienced, talented manager was hired. Yet the new hire's insistence on working fully remotely clashed with the company's culture of rapid, in-person idea exchange and quick problem-solving. One person's working style began disrupting the whole system, causing the new initiative to stall—demonstrating that in a complex organism, a single changed variable doesn't produce a linear effect; it can destabilize the entire system.

Reflection questions: In which key processes do you see your company stalling? Is the cause systemic, or is it rooted in company culture?

3. Managing Through Leaders (Building a Real Team)

A CEO must honestly ask: do I really have a strong team? It's possible to have excellent individual specialists—a great CFO, a strong marketer, an excellent commercial director—without them actually functioning as a team. A telling sign of a missing team: if the CEO still has to personally make most of the important decisions, what exists is a group of functional managers orbiting the owner, not a true management team.

A real team has three essential components:

1. The right people in the right seats. Companies often hire someone simply because they're "a good person"—but being a good person is not a profession. Every role should be filled based on the specific competencies the company needs at its current stage. For example, someone tasked with building a commercial division from scratch needs a candidate who has actually built one from scratch before, not someone who merely managed an already-established division—otherwise the CEO ends up doing the employee's job alongside them.

2. The team itself should be the star, not individual star employees. Just as in sports, assembling a roster of star players doesn't guarantee a winning team if they don't play well together. The players need to be synchronized, aligned on direction, and bonded through genuine relationships. A good CEO invests real personal time turning a group of stars into a cohesive team, including informal, non-work interactions—neglecting this is a common and regrettable mistake.

3. A disciplined management rhythm, built around four types of meetings:

   • Annual strategy session – the most important meeting of the year, spanning a couple of days (plus preparation time), defining where the business is headed for the next year or more.
   • Quarterly meeting – a one-day mini-strategy session to check progress against annual goals, adjust for market changes, and discard goals that no longer make sense.
   • Weekly meeting – lasting 30–90 minutes, where managers quickly review what was accomplished, current problems, and the plan for the week ahead. Critically, problems should be surfaced here, not solved in the meeting itself—solving takes a scheduled follow-up with only the relevant people.
   • Daily 15-minute meeting – the most important and hardest to sustain, where top executives quickly share their three key events, three biggest problems, and the current day's plan. This daily synchronization lets a manager spot a subordinate's problem immediately rather than losing a full week waiting for the next weekly meeting.

Reflection question: Is your team truly a "stellar team," or just a collection of unconnected star employees?

4. Creating and Engaging a Board of Directors (Advisory Board)

Even small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from an advisory structure, even though formal boards of directors are typically associated with large, legally mandated corporate governance in joint-stock companies. For smaller businesses, this is better framed as an advisory board, created purely to help the CEO achieve business goals.

How it worked in practice:

• At the lighting company, an advisory board included owners of similar trade and manufacturing businesses plus a co-owner of an investment fund who offered a big-picture, outside perspective. The board met quarterly for 3–4 hours on a strict agenda, with management reports and strategy shared in advance (an NDA is recommended for members who aren't close personal contacts). Their role was to challenge the CEO's ideas and decisions. In one case, the board dismantled a plan to co-invest in a finished-goods warehouse with a German manufacturer, showing the idea wouldn't actually generate profit—saving significant time and money, since being immersed in daily operations can create a blind "positive bubble."
• At the furniture company, a separate advisory board was assembled for a specific one-year purpose: strengthening e-commerce and digital lead generation, an area where the company lacked expertise. Three outside experts—two digital agency owners and the founder of an online booking company—met quarterly over a year and helped introduce a unit-economics perspective the company had never used before.

The key is to first define the specific goal for the advisory board, then select its composition accordingly. Board members offer opinions and advice, but the CEO retains full authority on whether to act on them.

5. Maintaining Relationships with All Stakeholders

Stakeholders are any individuals, groups, or organizations with an interest in a company's activities, whose decisions can influence the business, or whose own business depends on the company's results. This includes customers, employees, investors, partners, suppliers, and government bodies (relevant work with the state is often formalized as GR, or Government Relations). As a company grows, it stops existing solely within its own four walls—its results increasingly depend on an external web of relationships.

Example from the lighting company: The business initially recognized two key relationships—the paying customer (building owner) and architects/designers, who don't pay directly but strongly influence outcomes by specifying products in their plans and defending projects before the customer. What the company initially overlooked was the general contractor, who controls the actual construction budget and has strong incentive to cut costs wherever possible. Repeated instances of projects being redesigned or lost to competitors who worked directly with general contractors revealed this blind spot. The broader lesson: identifying all relevant stakeholders—and determining how to engage each one appropriately—is essential, since different stakeholders require different types of relationship management.

Working with stakeholders like general contractors requires more than occasional communication—it demands a deliberate, consistent policy. In one company, the team identified that general contractors operate under constant time pressure and urgently need fast responses to their requests, particularly revised estimates. The company established a clear internal principle: respond to any general contractor request within 24 hours, no exceptions. This meant that if a contractor called on a Friday needing an estimate revised by Monday morning, the team would come in over the weekend to get it done. This conscious, disciplined policy—internally dubbed "the year of the general contractor stakeholders"—significantly strengthened these relationships and delivered measurable material results.

Reflection exercise: Identify your most important stakeholder relationship right now, pick one, and schedule a meeting with them for next week.

6. Personal Effectiveness

The final and most personal responsibility is self-management. The guiding principle here is simple but powerful: a CEO should only do what only they can do.

Every hour a CEO spends on a task an employee could have done instead carries a significant opportunity cost. A CEO's time, influence, and compensation are disproportionate to those of subordinates, which means misallocating that time is enormously wasteful. This principle applies to any department head, not just CEOs: when a leader starts doing work their employees could handle themselves, they are failing at their actual job.

Common traps include:

• Approving routine marketing copy
• Resolving issues that department heads should own
• Getting involved in nearly every sales deal (selective involvement in the most strategically important deals is appropriate; blanket involvement is not)
• Constantly putting out operational fires

A CEO can work 60 hours a week and still perform poorly if a large portion of that time was spent doing someone else's job rather than the high-value work they're actually paid for.

A Practical Solution: Hire a Business Assistant

While full delegation is often unrealistic—especially for small and medium businesses during rapid growth phases when hiring quality staff can't keep pace—there is one concrete fix: hiring a business assistant. This is distinct from a traditional personal assistant who handles scheduling or errands. A true business assistant is a highly paid professional who quickly becomes fluent in the company's business context and takes over concrete, business-related tasks.

Examples of what a business assistant can handle:

• Researching and shortlisting vendors (e.g., finding the top three CRM implementation contractors, compiling reviews, arranging test tasks and calls), leaving the CEO only the final decision-making calls
• Collecting and organizing status reports from subordinates, with the authority—granted carefully and respectfully—to follow up when reports are late

The time savings from this kind of delegation, measured against a CEO's effective hourly rate, far outweigh the cost of a skilled assistant's salary. The book Buy Back Your Time is recommended as a deeper resource on this topic.

Reflection question: Of everything you did last week, what could truly only have been done by you?

Closing Insights from the Book

Several additional ideas stood out as particularly valuable:

• The CEO role is unique and irreplaceable. No one else in the company is truly responsible for everything. The position is famously described as "lonely at the top"—unlike other executives, who have peers at the same level to confide in and compare notes with, the CEO has no equivalent counterpart. (A rare exception is the co-CEO model seen in some fast-growing tech companies, where two people share the role—though this remains an unusual and somewhat puzzling arrangement.)

• Holding contradictory ideas simultaneously is a hallmark of elite leadership, echoing Fitzgerald's observation that true intelligence means holding two opposing ideas in mind while still being able to function. CEOs constantly face irreconcilable inputs—for example, during a cash crunch, a CFO may demand cost cuts to cover payroll while a marketing director insists that cutting marketing spend now will cause a revenue collapse months later. These are genuine dilemmas with no clearly right answer, often a choice between bad and worse.

• The single most important question for a CEO and their team is: what does winning look like for our company? This should be defined and agreed upon by the whole team—whether winning means market share, revenue growth, net profit, acquiring major new clients, extraordinary year-over-year growth, or acquiring a competitor. Strategy, fundamentally, is about playing to win.

• The framework for building a "star company" rests on two core parameters plus one critical follow-up question:

  1. The product must be mission-critical for clients—an "aspirin" business people cannot do without—rather than a "vitamin" business that's merely nice to have.
  2. The company should aim to hold the first or second position in its market segment, since data consistently shows that the top three players in any industry capture the overwhelming majority of profits while everyone else splits the remainder.
  3. The essential strategic question that ties these together: how can the company grow its revenue and profit tenfold? This isn't a near-term target but a long-range test of ambition—if tenfold growth seems genuinely impossible in a given market, it may be worth questioning whether that business is the right one to pursue at all.

Closing Exercise

Rate yourself—or your CEO—on a scale of one to ten across all six responsibilities:

1. Setting the direction for the company
2. Aligning the organization's operational processes
3. Managing through leaders (building a real team)
4. Establishing a board of directors or advisory board
5. Maintaining relationships with all key stakeholders
6. Managing personal effectiveness

Whichever area scores lowest is likely the primary constraint on the company's growth—since the CEO is the person who either unlocks a business's growth potential or becomes its limiting factor.