A Class of Super CEOs

The failures of the tech bubble have received attention disproportionate to the value of the lessons learned.

Is there a difference between CEOs who lived through the collapse of the tech bubble and those who did not have to face that challenge? Asking this question is like looking at the DNA of people infected in an epidemic to see why some got sick but recovered, some died, and some never had symptoms to begin with. Scientists do that kind of research all the time to see what it is that protects some people -- as well as to see, whatever that agent might be, whether it can be transferred to others so as to protect them as well.

I suggest that we may have a new class of super CEOs among us. These are CEOs who have -- for lack of a better word -- genes that are different from those of the general CEO population. These are CEOs who know how to recover -- or how not to get "sick" in the first place. For all its pain, something good that may have come out of the tech collapse was that -- by its very scope -- it provided a large sample of CEOs who were able to do something most high-tech CEOs (and probably most CEOs period) could not.

I would suggest that the failures of the tech bubble have received attention disproportionate to the value of the lessons learned. Bubbles come and go. They're pretty predictable. And the causes are well understood. What's gone relatively under-reported and under-researched are the thousands of "everyday" success stories that seem to fly in the face of these cycles. These stories are different from the relatively small number of celebrity cases, like Apple Computer, that are constantly getting coverage -- but which most CEOs (or would-be CEOs) would find virtually impossible to emulate.

Two qualities distinguish this new class of super CEOs from the celebrities: there are many more of them and their lessons are more transferable. So their impact should be much greater.