The Impact of a CEO

Sometimes, I think people underestimate the impact that a CEO can have on a corporate culture or the company’s success. The example I'll give you is John Sculley and Bill Gates. Though Apple paid lip service to the Unix market with A/UX, both companies missed the Internet by a country mile. Netscape came out of nowhere. The reason Netscape was there in Silicon Graphics was because the Internet was a Unix-based phenomena and neither company really cared that much about Unix and so they both missed it. But what was very interesting is the way the two companies responded. So Bill, as you probably famously know, had a two-day offsite, wrote a white paper, 10 pages long, and turned the company around literally in three days and said, we have got to effectively supplant the Netscape Navigator. And Apple did absolutely nothing and of course, you now know what happened. Again, that's just what the CEO can do and demand out of an organization. So another point that I learned painfully is the CEO is really, really important.