What It Means to Be a Great CEO
This year, like every year, I’m focused on being a better version of the roles I play in my life. Over the holidays I sat down to think deeply about what it means to be a great CEO for Humanity Labs. I’m sharing this with you so you can hold me to it.
Most people think of a CEO as the person at the top. That’s true in the same way the windshield is “at the front” of the car. Technically correct. Also misses the point. The windshield isn’t the engine. It isn’t the wheels. It doesn’t move anything. But it does determine what the driver can see, what they ignore, and what they slam into at 70 miles an hour.
The CEO’s job starts with a basic question: What’s true? Not what’s comforting. Not what’s politically convenient. Not what our dashboards can measure. What’s true? And what should we do about it?
That question never resolves. The information is always incomplete. So the job isn’t to find certainty - it’s to act well without it.
Answering honestly requires a weird mix of traits. Confident enough to pick a direction. Humble enough to change it. Optimistic enough to inspire. Paranoid enough to prepare. Warm enough to build trust. Hard enough to make calls that disappoint people I like.
In practice, I allocate three things:
Attention. Want to understand a CEO? Ignore their strategy deck. Read their calendar. Where attention goes, energy flows. Where energy flows, money follows. A CEO’s attention is the company’s flashlight. Point it at the right things and companies transform. Point it at the wrong thing long enough and the wrong thing becomes the thing.
People. The CEO builds the team that builds the team. A healthy company isn’t built by a heroic CEO. It’s built by a great team with clarity, trust, speed, and accountability. My job is to create that environment and protect it.
Every hire is a bet. Every promotion is a signal. Every tolerated behavior becomes policy. I become, whether I like it or not, the embodiment of culture. Not what I say I value. What I actually reward, punish, ignore, and allow.
This is where agency matters most. I want a team where people own outcomes, not tasks. Where you don’t wait for permission to solve a problem you can see.
Money. Most CEOs come up through sales, operations, engineering, or product. Then one day they realize the biggest decisions they make are capital allocation: reinvest or distribute, grow or consolidate, buy or build, add headcount or automate. Capital allocation is where strategy stops being a noun and becomes a verb. It’s where vision gets an audit.
The CEO is the Chief “No” Officer. Every yes is a no to something else. Every strategy is a pile of exclusions. The company will always ask for more: more initiatives, more products, more meetings, more hires, more exceptions, more complexity.
I have to be comfortable disappointing people in the short term so we don’t disappoint everyone in the long term.
A lot of this work is invisible. Pressure management. Absorbing emotion without spreading it. Knowing what I think and saying it with grace. Carrying the weight of uncertain outcomes while still asking the team to move decisively.
The best CEOs have humility and intensity. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. They need to be the clearest. They don’t need all the answers. They need to be willing to make the hard call.
That’s what I’m aiming for this year.
Inspired by some recent reading from Brent Beshore.