The "Right" CEO: A Corporate Life Cycle Perspective

Jack Dorsey’s departure from his CEO position at Twitter evoked a positive response from the market, raising interesting questions about Founder CEO tenure, and more generally about what it is that makes for a "great" CEO. Rather than buy into the one-size-fits-all approach, I argue that the right CEO for a company will depend on where it is in the life cycle, as young companies need visionaries, growth companies need builders, mature companies need defenders and declining companies need liquidators at the helm. I also argue that as life cycles get compressed, companies are aging faster, and that this will put more founder CEOs on the hot spot, and that family groups will face challenges as the companies under their control transition across the life cycle.
Slides: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/blog/CEOLifeCycle.pdf
Blog Post: https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2021/12/managing-across-corporate-life-cycle.html