Being Quiet Is Part of Being a Good CEO
The amount of literature devoted to teaching people how to become a successful executive is vast. And that’s no surprise: People aspire to be in the C-suite, and they want to do a good job when they finally get to the top rung of the corporate ladder. Moreover, leaders are faced with great expectations and are usually the ones held responsible when things go wrong. Which begs the question: How do you stop things from going wrong?
Hal Gregersen, the executive director of MIT’s Leadership Center, has been researching whether corporate leaders are too comfortable once they get to the top. Gregersen interviewed more than 200 senior business executives—including Elon Musk of Tesla, Ed Catmull of Pixar, Sara Blakely of Spanx, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce—on how leaders become insulated from information they need, and
