From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general.

Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.

The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role

> really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help

This world view is not falsifiable. Regardless of success you can say it was luck.

But I just don’t understand this. In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility, and often they don’t want to, or it doesn’t work out. Why would you expect that you could drop them in as CEO?

Are CEOs always the cause of success or failure? No. Are they good at avoiding blame? Yes. Are they also extremely skilled and competent people? Yes.

I feel like we should consider the opposite as well. What if you actually hire someone who is great but they achieve zero results because of sheet bad luck and “help” from a product team that couldn’t go right.

The guy who took over JC Penney's after leaving Apple's Retail division is a good example of this. On paper great pedigree. Success --but did not understand a different, albeit retail, market so well and things tanked horribly.

CEOs are basically dice rollers. "Proven" are just formerly lucky gamblers. The only control that CEO has is whether they roll the dice themselves or let their underlings roll. It's entirely possible that the only CEOs that are winning against the odds are the ones that roll themselves the least.

[dead]