Bcg Henderson Institute

In The CEO: The Role, the Reality, the Responsibility, Nitin Nohria argues that the CEO’s real work is not making the big decisions personally but building the conditions under which thousands of good decisions get made by everyone else. Nohria is the former dean of Harvard Business School, where he is currently the George F. Baker Professor of Administration, and for nearly 30 years he has run the invitation-only New CEO Workshop for recently appointed chief executives of the world’s largest companies. His latest book draws on that work, on empirical research into how much CEOs actually affect company performance, and on roughly 70,000 hours of data from real CEO calendars, to replace the myth of the heroic chief executive with a clear-eyed account of what the job involves: setting direction, allocating resources, shaping culture, managing stakeholders, and absorbing relentless scrutiny. In his conversation with Adam Job, senior director at the BCG Institute, Nohria discusses how much the person in the seat