Chapter 9

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What It’s Really Like to Be a CEO

A businessman said to me the other day that it’s more difficult to become a Fortune 50 CEO than it is to become a professional athlete. He said: “It’s harder to get to the top of the corporate ladder than it is to be an elite athlete. Isn’t that something?”

I never thought of it that way but the more those words sank in, the more I realized he was right. Getting to what’s called the C-suite—the uppermost level of management—is a competition just like in any other sport. And like a game, there’s only one winner in the end. Jim Reynolds, the CEO of the boutique investment bank Loop Capital, is friends with many professional athletes around Chicago—former Super Bowl champs, basketball stars, golf pros.

“Each and every one of these professional athletes is an entrepreneur. Their company is themselves and their body. Once that body breaks down, it’s over,” he said. “When you’re a young athlete with quickness and speed, raw physical prowess, you learn about how to do things and how not to exert yourself so much, learn how to anticipate the plays better and read the other guys’ eyes. CEOs are the same way—they have to be on top of their game, every game. And there are hundreds of people looking to take Kobe Bryant’s spot, or LeBron James’. At the point you stop or cease growing as a professional athlete, then that’s the point you open yourself to be susceptible to the competition. You need to make sure you’re mentally at the top of the game . . . as a CEO you have to learn the plays of your competitors, what’s the next pop in the market. I draw many parallels between elite athletes and very good CEOs and entrepreneurs—when you think about it, the differences are almost imperceptible. You’re doing different things but mentally the strategies are very close.”

In fact, as I learned quite quickly, you do need to be physically fit to be a CEO.

“The physical part of it is the hardest—it just mounts,” said Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan. “Wherever you go, you’re on. There’s always a great team with me on trips but the CEO himself or herself often has to do the five town halls, the interviews, the client meetings. You can have all the senior help in the world but often you’re the one who’s front and center.”

I heard that a lot. The sheer physical nature of the job was daunting. Teresa Taylor, the former COO of Qwest, described it like this: “I didn’t realize how programmed my schedule was, because, you know, you have things scheduled out a year in advance. And it’s just every day, my assistant would hand me my schedule, and it’s run, run, run, run. And I didn’t have a lot of choices because there were a lot of obligations. When I left [the office], I thought, you mean, I can decide if I want to do this? And the great part about leaving was I could have lunch with who I wanted to, not with who I had to.”

Ask the Boss: How Do You Hire?
Maybe CEOs can’t tell us what to do next but they can surely tell us how they view their staff and what they think of them.
For instance, what do they look for when they hire?
“I look for probably taking the time to get a good education,” Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, said. He employs over 170,000 people. “Obviously, some people don’t have the wherewithal or the family support or the family means to get a good education, but I’m a big believer in a good undergraduate and postgraduate education. I’m a big believer in business schools. I’ve often said other things being equal, if there were two candidates, I’d choose the business school graduate over the non-business school graduate, which is a view that many people do not share and think is crazy. But I think if somebody has made the effort to go to business school and think about business and do that for the two years or so that you spend at a good school . . . the fact that these schools are self-selecting, the chances are that the people that come out of them are going to be better than those who don’t.”
A good many of them spoke about the importance of consistency. Nobody wanted to see a potential candidate jump around a lot from job to job. Outside of Silicon Valley, where high growth means high turnover, it was hard to find any CEO who thought brief stints at companies was good for one’s career.
“I think you can’t ignore first and foremost, the record of the people,” said Ralph Schlosstein at Evercore. “How have they done in school? And this is entry level hiring I’m talking about. The breadth of their interests. I can normally tell within five minutes of meeting someone, whether it’s someone who I would want to hire or not, just from whether there is a sparkle in their eyes and a curiosity and interest about them.
“The one thing I don’t like is people who have four or five firms on their resume. Whenever we hire someone, my expectation is that they’d spend the rest of their career at the firm. But if somebody has been in five different places already and you hire them, chances are after two or three years, they’re going to go to a seventh place.”
I think there are a few exceptions to this view. One is that when you’re young, you jump around a lot. I know I did. When I graduated college, my first job lasted four months. The second lasted two years. And then I kept moving position after position every two to three years. I was too afraid to buy a home anywhere because, I thought, in a few years I’d leave. But to Ralph’s point, after a while your career matures and you find a place you clearly want to make your career in.
Other reasons you might jump around are that you’ve switched careers and are starting all over again or you’ve been laid off and needed to find your footing, even if that meant taking a job that you didn’t exactly want. But those jumps can be easily explained in an interview.
Elon Musk said there are only two questions he asks every candidate.
“One is to just explain the path of their careers,” he said. “Why they made those decisions that lead from one role to the next. And the second one is to list evidence of exceptional ability. And academics is just one element.”
Among the other elements he looks for: winning competitions.
“It’s probably more important than academics. So if somebody has won the Formula SAE which is where you have to design and build a racecar and then race it and win, if somebody has really done well at that, that’s much more valuable than getting a 4.0 GPA and way harder.”
Later I found out Elon was talking about the head of the structures team at Tesla, who had won the Formula SAE and whose grades were nowhere near straight A’s.
When asked the question on what he looks for in a candidate, Jamie Dimon said it’s not about the resume, but the story.
“I often say there’s a book on everybody,” he said. “There’s a book on you right now. I don’t really know the book on you but if I wanted to know I don’t need to talk to you at all. I can talk to your friends, bosses, peers, subordinates, ex-­partners, or boyfriends and I would know. I would know how hard you work, whether you show up on time, if you’re trustworthy, whether you keep your word, whether you’re a great friend, I’d know all of that. And we write our own books. It’s really amazing—you almost don’t have to meet the person.”
Jamie went further and said if you talk to enough people, you start to get a feel for the entire company.
“One of the first things I did when I got here, I take everyone around [for breakfast, lunch, dinner]. I’d get to know people . . . and I’d ask what do you read? Who do you talk to? What’s going on? Who do you trust in the company? And after a little time or maybe a little martini, you’d be shocked how consistent it is regarding who people trust and who they don’t.”
“The same names come up?” I ask.
“The same names and the same themes,” he replied.
Jim Reynolds had an interesting take, one that matched the high growth nature of his company.
“The first thing I look for is bandwidth. Can that person process where we want to go? Not where we are today. I know this organization is changing and I am looking to buy companies and do different things. Do they have the bandwidth to go with me?
“One of the other things that’s important to me is how much of a team player they are. Is the individual just about them and do they really want the career to be about them or are they somebody that looks at a goal and says, ‘We got that done, we did,’ or will they say, ‘I did it, I led the team?’ ”
“How can you tell that in an interview?” I asked. “Everyone is going to say they’re a team player.”
“It goes back to listening. When you hear people say, ‘I made this happen’ or ‘I did this’ and if you drill down and listen if they say ‘me’ versus ‘my team and I.’ Again, it goes back to those leading questions. I’ll ask, ‘When you were on the trading desk, how did you work together?’ and if they say, ‘No, I took my own capital and I did this . . . ’ or if you ask, ‘What kind of research did you do?’ and they said, ‘I did all my own research, our department was useless with research.’ You just listen to the answers.”
Every CEO admitted he or she has made hiring mistakes. No formula is foolproof.
“I think the biggest mistake that I made earlier when I was younger, just from starting companies, was to put too much emphasis on an individual’s ability as opposed to their personality or how they affect others around them,” Elon said. “I mean, it was really quite dumb because you should always evaluate somebody’s contribution to the company net of how they affect others. At the very beginning of PayPal, when it was called X.com, I had one really smart individual but he was just not a good guy. He was really manipulative . . . it kind of really weakened the beginning of the company. And I actually made the mistake again at the beginning of Tesla. So you’ve got to take somebody’s ability and then also ask, are they a good person? That’s actually pretty important.”
Ralph Schlosstein said at his firm, they have the “no jerks rule.”
“Sometimes we might say no assholes in less polite company [laughing]. [My partners and I] all feel pretty passionately about that. I remember two people who we interviewed last year. Roger Altman and I both interviewed them. They were inarguably talented and inarguably would have produced a lot of revenue for the firm. After we both met with them, we said we really have to recruit them aggressively. And we checked them out at the two places that they had been before and both of them came back as profoundly ‘I’ people rather than ‘we’ people. And we just stopped the discussions.”
“These people were clearly talented,” I said.
“Yeah, they were extremely talented, but not at the expense of the culture and the teamwork within our firm. And you know, notwithstanding the fact that most people in our business have a pretty high opinion of themselves, some of the people I interview are legends in their own minds [laughter]. But investment banking really is a team sport and there are very few situations where one person knows everything.”

In my own way, I could relate to that pressure of always being on. There are no bad days allowed on television. You can’t walk onto the studio set and let on that your nanny just quit and you’re having a bad hair day. You have to be in the moment and focused on the task at hand. But at a certain point, I can turn it off. When the lights go down, I can go back to being a “normal” person. CEOs can’t. Everywhere they go, they represent their company. Any look, comment, smile is ­interpreted and misinterpreted a thousand different ways by their staff. Add on the pressures of a moving stock price and it’s easy to see why being a CEO requires a kind of athleticism.

Chris Burch, the CEO of C. Wonder, who helped his ex-wife Tory Burch create their fashion empire, said wherever he goes, people are pitching him an idea.

“I don’t mind it. It’s kind of part of my job,” he said. “It can get a little overwhelming.”

“How often?” I ask.

“Like twenty people a day. They somehow know me and they pitch me. But I like the fact that I’m open. I actually love people and I want them to be successful. I really care about them.”

“I always thought CEOs sat by themselves and made big powerful decisions,” said Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL who was in the throes of restructuring the company. “The thing most people don’t realize, at a small or big company, the CEO’s job at the end of the day is a team job where you play on a team. That is probably the most surprising thing for me. The unpleasant part of the job is there are some decisions that only you can make. And some decisions are not pleasant. There’s times when you have to put the organization ahead of your own personal feelings.”

“A friend of mine just became the CEO of a big company,” Jamie Dimon continued. “I said there are two things you’re going to really notice. Number one is you can’t complain to anyone anymore about how things work because it’s you at the top . . . and the second is that even if you don’t think you’re making decisions when someone is presenting to you, just by listening and nodding you are giving tacit approval. Someone may come into your office and ask about A, B, C, and D and I’ll be nodding. That person goes out believing that it’s been approved. The CEO has a veto.”

I asked him to explain further.

“It means you may walk into my office and say, ‘I’m going to buy this and sell that, investigate this, negotiate that, and pay this amount.’ I don’t have to say a word but the fact that I didn’t veto it says you have approval.

“You are now the person giving that approval or making the decision and there’s no one else there with that role,” he added, turning around and waving at the empty air behind him. “For a lot of these big companies, there are no real road maps. So you can look at what happened before, you can look at how someone else did it. It’s not necessarily a road map for what you’re dealing with, though it might be. Sometimes there are clear road maps but often there are not and you have to deal with it as you see it.”

Which led to another revelation as I continued interviewing CEOs: the job is quite lonely.

“I have a great team at Cisco, really good people, but when it really gets tough as a leader, you are by yourself. It is lonely and that is something you just have to realize,” John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, said. “Now that doesn’t mean you don’t reach out to the team. It doesn’t mean you don’t listen to the team or your board of directors, but the leader has to know when the pressure’s really on. It is one of the loneliest jobs in the world. You ask any CEO who’s really been in the firing line . . . you might need to say, ‘Is leadership really lonely especially when you’re under pressure?’ and you can watch their pupils dilate if you hit the person who’s been through that. It is really lonely.”

One research and consulting firm already asked a group of CEOs, half of whom agreed with John. According to a 2012 study by RHR International, 50 percent of the CEOs they surveyed who ran ­businesses topping out at $2 billion in revenue said they experienced loneliness in their jobs. Sixty-one percent believed the isolation hindered their performance. It was worse for freshman CEOs.

This is apparently not a new revelation. David Nadler, the vice chairman of Marsh and McLennan and an advisor to many CEOs in his long career, described the loneliness issue in a 1998 book, Executive Teams.

“Through the mid-1980s, a CEO could easily serve out a normal tenure without ever experiencing a true period of discontinuous change,” he wrote in a chapter aptly titled “The World of the CEO.” “From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, with the restructuring of U.S. business and the growing intensity of foreign competition, there was a high probability that a CEO would encounter one cycle in which he would have to manage discontinuous change . . . the toll this responsibility takes on CEOs, on a very personal level, should not be underestimated.”

And as if to further underline the isolation, Nadler drew this chart of the CEO, which he permitted me to use. The first thing I thought of was “the eye of the storm.”

image

Over a decade later, pressures have only exponentially grown for the office of the CEO—from foreign competition, to stock price volatility, to shareholder activists. At the time of this writing, retailer J.C. Penney had just ousted its CEO, Ron Johnson, for getting rid of the heavy discounting shoppers loved. He’d been on the job for 17 months. Bill Lynch was also booted after just three years on the job leading Barnes and Noble. His strategy of focusing on the e-book side of the business wasn’t gaining any traction. People, including Nolan Bushnell, were calling time on Tim Cook’s leadership at Apple, saying he had only 12 to 18 months to prove he could keep creating Jobs-esque products.

And when you think about it, the financial crisis of 2008 was a great equalizer when it came to snuffing out who was the best bank CEO and who was the worst. Who fell down during the crisis and who rose to the occasion? Very quickly, CEOs like Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal, Citigroup’s Chuck Prince, Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld—guys who had been doing just fine so long as everything was running well—got cut down. You’ve never heard from them again. It’s as if they vaporized into thin air, albeit with their millions in the bank.

But others, like John Mack at Morgan Stanley, Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan saw the pending storm and bolted down the hatches. They ran their firms against the wind and ate up the smaller guys. Some became villains like Blankfein, whose firm was famously described as a “giant vampire squid” by Rolling Stone writer Matthew Taibbi. But you can’t deny that Blankfein confidently led Goldman through the crisis and has emerged atop the heap, a little weathered with a beard, but still on top. Jamie Dimon came out of the financial chaos looking like General George Patton, the man who could not be shaken. Although by the time I met with him, he was facing another, more personal challenge. Angry shareholders were threatening to vote him out of the chairman’s role over the trading scandal in London.

“To me, the financial crisis separated the good and the bad CEO,” said Jim Reynolds. “It makes you think about the power of that seat. The good ones are the true visionaries because when you sit in that seat, the buck stops with you. By the time it gets to your desk, you cannot point the finger at anyone else. That is the only seat in the firm that’s like that. You have to have the vision, focus, discipline, passion, intelligence, a strong sense of self, and confidence. But not hubris, because that can lead you in the wrong direction. The ability to make decisions based on good information and then when you’re wrong, change those decisions immediately.”

“I think I would want to ask other CEOs, ‘Who are the two, three, four people they surround themselves with to ensure they can be successful?’” said Susan Lyne, the former CEO of the luxury retailer The Gilt Groupe and now head of AOL Brands. “Most CEOs can’t do that job without a really great inner circle and that doesn’t mean your direct reports. I would love to hear how different people put together the office of the CEO.”

“I ask other CEOs: How do you run your place? I call them and ask, ‘What do you do? How do you actually run it?’” Jamie said. “And you’d be surprised for some people there are no formal meetings—Warren Buffett for example. For others, they get on the road and out in the market often. One way is not necessarily better than the other but I always ask successful leaders: How do you do it?”

“Have you modeled yourself on anybody?” I ask.

“No, but I’ve learned from watching all of them. Bob Lipp [the former JPMorgan board member] I used to work with, he just had a great way with people. Bob used to have the Hall of Shame. He’d put the stupidest memo up on the wall. I was up there once or twice. But he made it fun for people. It was his way of killing bureaucracy. I remember Bob at the end of the year would call the top 50 branches and just congratulate them, ask them what did you do so well? And I took note about sharing best practices like that.”

“I have not been a CEO, but I ran our investment bank for almost two decades and I have spent most of my career advising CEOs,” Jimmy Lee, who sits a few doors down from Jamie at JPMorgan, said. “And I agree it can be lonely at the top. It’s also windy at the top. That’s why you need to build that great team around you and make sure that team is doing the same thing with their people. The French have an expression: The graveyards are full of indispensable men . . . and women.”

The discussion about loneliness and isolation made the office a little more human. For a majority of us, we have bosses we have to defer to, people who make final decisions, and who, in many ways, ­determine our future career paths. But we also have colleagues to socialize with and mentors to seek advice from. CEOs are the be-all and end-all in their organizations. They make the final decisions. They’re at a table for one. I imagine it can be a scary place because you don’t have many people you can bounce ideas off of.

Ask the Boss: What Does Open-Door Policy Really Mean?
Most CEOs say they have an open-door policy but do they really?
“I think our culture starts with the fact that the door to my office has never been closed and I’ve been in this office now for twenty years,” said Sam Zell. “This is a conscious choice that tells people in more than words that everyone has access to me. Anyone can come in anytime to talk about issues, deals, whatever. About ten years ago, I put M&Ms in a bowl on a table in my office when somebody sent me a bunch of them. Today, people walk into my office, take some M&Ms, and leave, and often don’t even say hello!
“What I’m really talking about is access. The fact that I interface with everybody, that I see everybody walking past the door and people say hi, that means you’re involved. In so many corporations, the contact levels are very rigid and people don’t go much beyond their own levels to interact. If you’re the CEO, you have five direct reports. Those are the only people you talk to regularly, your only source of information.”
The reality is that many of us do work in hierarchical companies. But that doesn’t mean the CEO is not accessible. I spent many years at several companies never thinking once I could simply call up the CEO’s office and request a meeting. But apparently, this happens.
“I have to tell you, I was just always amazed that generally the very young talent in the company had no problem calling my office directly and demanding to have time with me,” Teresa Taylor said. “And I always took it because I was always intrigued by this—just to have the guts to do that. If they have the guts to pick up the phone, talk to my secretary and say, ‘I need time with her, I’m a first-level manager in this company and I deserve it,’ which is generally their attitude, I’d say, ‘Bring them in.’ ”
I wondered what came out of these meetings.
“I’m sure it didn’t go the way they wanted, because it usually started with, ‘What is this company going to do for me, to manage my career?’ Those were the words—‘me’ ‘my’—and I would usually say, ‘Nothing. What are you going to do for yourself?’ And the conversation always went a different direction. I would say probably fifty percent of the people walked out saying, ‘That was awful. Oh, my God, what was I ­thinking?’ The other fifty percent said, you know, ‘Thanks, and I appreciate it.’ And I would hear from those people later in life.”
It was good advice from Teresa. If you’re going to spend 15 minutes with the CEO of your company, better to show him or her what you can do for them rather than pry out of them what they think of you. I thought of what Susan Lyne said about gravitating towards people who can give her feedback, people who do not necessarily report directly to her.
It’s a delicate line to maneuver. Once you’re in the meeting, the CEO is wondering why you’re there. Harvey Golub said of his time at American Express, “Anybody could get to me, but for somebody who didn’t report to me, if they called and said, ‘I want to set up a meeting with Harvey,’ my secretary would have asked ‘What about?’ She probably would have set it up and if a person came in to complain about his boss, I would say, ‘Well, let’s get your boss in here. Let him hear what you’re saying as well.’ So you do those things carefully. You don’t abuse the privilege of being the boss.”
Harvey is a friendly but measured person. From the brief times I’ve met and had lunch with him, he’s very thoughtful, opinionated, and blunt. I can imagine some personalities mesh well with his and others don’t. But that’s just a fact of personal relations. Some people you can easily talk to and others you can’t. And some CEOs you can easily sit in an office with and chat away and others, well, you might be checking the clock after 10 minutes.
And very few CEOs take it to the accessibility level like Jamie Dimon or Warren Buffett. Warren, as I mentioned, is in the rarefied group of rock-star CEOs. Investors travel from all over the world to meet him in Omaha. Athletes, celebrities, billionaires come to see Buffett to glean his advice. At the Berkshire annual meeting one year, U2’s front man, Bono, strolled under the dome of the CenturyLink stadium to hear Buffett speak.
And every year, planeloads of students visit. It’s almost as if Warren Buffett is his own foreign exchange student program.
“Students ask me that all the time, how do I find [what I love to do]?” Buffett said. “I just tell them you keep looking and you’ll know it when you see it. I can’t promise you that it will be tomorrow, or next week, or next year.” He mentioned in a few months he would be hosting another group of students from the Middle East.
Jamie Dimon, in the meantime, hosts employees on the JPMorgan bus he rides across the country, visiting clients and branches. He opens up his collar, trashes the tie, and dons the cowboy boots in say, Austin, Texas, where he was in February 2013.
“I say to people that when they come on the bus they have immunity. We do it in groups and it is fun for people. I often start off by saying ‘So there’s a reason you’re all here. Tell me where we can be better or where we’re messing up.’ I tell them about some stupid practices another group told me about. And they’re all laughing because they’ve been frustrated by the same thing.”
“Do you hear from them afterwards?” I ask.
“Sure, I get e-mails and other comments. We track their ideas. We follow up on every idea so they know we weren’t kidding.”
I asked if there was an example of an idea that was followed up on.
“Hundreds. There are hundreds. We’ve learned that tellers should be more involved in the design of the teller systems because they’re the ones that have to use it. One teller told me that she and her colleagues would have to go through an entire account opening process with a new customer only to find out afterwards through another process that the customer was not eligible for that service. In hindsight it seems obvious we should have switched the order of how we were bringing these customers on board. And since then, we’ve saved thousands of wasted hours. There are hundreds of these types of examples that still pop up.”
A few months later, Jamie Dimon handily won the vote to keep his chairman’s title. He won it by a bigger majority than expected. Headlines blared that now the “Cult of Jamie” had been cemented. One financial blogger asked, “Is Jamie Too Big to Fire?” All of those news stories inevitably raised the other question: What happens if Jamie gets hit by the bus? Who will take his place?
For a CEO, the questions are never ending.

“Once you become CEO, you suddenly realize you’re generally not getting tacit approval for your decisions,” Jamie said. “You have the company board but they’re not making the day-to-day decisions.” I recalled how Warren Buffett said if his board started meddling in his work he’d tell them to stick it up their backsides.

Another CEO mused that if he started asking his senior managers for advice because he was unsure of a decision, he’d set off a panic. “They look to you to know what you’re doing. If you tell them you have no idea if something is going to work, suddenly they get worried and wonder if you can lead and where the company is headed,” he said.

And even if CEOs were to ask for input from the people under them, it’s not guaranteed they would ever get the true answer. Ralph Schlosstein, the CEO of Wall Street firm Evercore, said that was the first thing he noticed after getting the corner office.

“I would say that probably the biggest thing that I gained an appreciation for, which I just didn’t have an appreciation for before, is how hard you have to work to make sure that people really give you their honest opinion,” he said. “The deferral to seniority is such a natural instinct. You get to know that there are some people who are never going to tell you the truth. And it’s not that they are constantly lying to you. They just feel that it jeopardizes their career to express a view different from yours.”

I asked him what someone should do if they wanted to express a different opinion.

“I’d say number one, think really carefully about how you’re going to phrase it. Think through all aspects of it. And I would say those types of things are often best done in one-on-one private conversations.”

Teresa Taylor, the former COO of Qwest, felt the same way as Ralph.

“Everybody filters the information for you,” she said. “Everybody wants to tell you everything is going to be okay, when it’s not. It’s all orchestrated. So it’s really hard to get to the truth.”

She said she would get out of her office and “walk the floors” to see what was really going on at the company.

“I’d even just stand in the back of the room and I would just chat with someone and after a while they would say, ‘You look familiar,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I work here,’ and I would just try to keep it real low key because that’s when people would open up. So it’s a lonely job, no question about that.”

Granted there are the major perks—the huge pay packages, the amenities like a corporate jet, the glamour of being invited to all the glittering events. “There’s definitely an ego trip to people waiting for you to walk in the room, people asking you, do I want a Diet Coke and they already knew I liked Diet Coke. All those little things are a total ego trip, you know?” Teresa said.

Diet Coke: The Choice of a CEO Generation
If there was one consistent theme throughout my interviews with CEOs, it was that they all seemed to drink the same thing during the day.
Diet Coke.
I already knew Warren Buffett drank Coke. Specifically, Cherry Coke (he also sat on the board of Coca-Cola for 17 years and is its biggest individual shareholder).
But other CEOs mentioned Diet Coke. Elon Musk has it stocked in his refrigerator. Maybe Diet Coke is the new black coffee.
John Chambers put a spin on the Diet Coke: He used it as cover to get a break.
“Every meeting I have, there’s not even five minutes between them, sometimes not even 30 seconds,” he said. “So what I originally did was I walked over and got a Diet Coke and walked back. That would allow me time to frame my question for the next meeting, finish up my prior meeting before I go in.”
That worked very well, he said, until “people started bringing my Diet Cokes to me.”

No ego trip was enough, though, to attract anyone to the job of CEO of AIG. AIG was probably the most hated company during the 2008 financial crisis, when its financial products division essentially blew up the financial system and cost Americans millions of jobs. By the time Bob Benmosche, who had retired from MetLife years ago and was growing grapes in his Croatian vineyard, got the phone call, the government had run out of options. Nobody wanted the job. I imagined it like the Gotham Police calling Batman—someone dark and mysterious had to save the world. Except in this case Batman was a silver-haired insurance executive.

“I was done. I said at sixty-two years old . . . I wanted to focus on my personal life,” Bob recalled. “My wife and I have been separated for a long time and I had another relationship which was important to me and I wanted to just figure out what life is all about. Once, I said to [former AIG CEO] Hank Greenberg, ‘We did research at MetLife and I’m going to tell you the outcome, but it’s a secret. And after years of study we found out that everyone dies. And not only did we find that out, but we found out also that they don’t get to take it with them.’ And so you have to say to yourself, ‘When is enough enough?’ And find other things to enjoy and so I chose to focus on my home in Dubrovnik . . . it took six years to do this project.

“I started my vineyards in 2006, two of them. And I decided to become a winemaker. And so I started planting grapes and going up and seeing how the grapes were growing,” he continued. “It was a little boring. I was retired for three years and life was good.”

After the AIG board and government officials convinced Bob to take on the job to turn around AIG, “I told everybody I’m going to be vicious and aggressive. I’m going to complain about everything that’s been done and then I’m going to fix it. But you need to understand when I’m asked I’m going to tell them that I think [people in Congress] are nuts.”

Bob’s exact words the first time he met with AIG employees was that he thought Congress was filled with a bunch of “crazies” and they could “stick it where the sun don’t shine” if the lawmakers called him out to Washington to testify. Those quotes howled through the halls of Congress and turned Bob into both a troublemaker and a hero.

“It became clear that there isn’t anybody in Washington that wants me within 100 miles of the place. But that’s why even Elijah Cummings [Democratic congressman from Maryland] surprised me when he went on TV after some of those comments and he said, ‘Look, he’s got a good reputation. We’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt. He just shouldn’t bite the hand that’s been feeding him. But for now I have nothing further to say but let’s see how he does.’ And that’s the last I heard from anybody in Congress. So part of the whole intent was the people in this company had to understand that I have an f— you attitude and that I’m going to do it. Here’s what I’m going to do.”

Bob’s ordeal reminded me of what Jamie would go through three years later in 2012 with the $6 billion London Whale trading fiasco, when a few rogue traders threatened to take down the entire firm. Or what Warren Buffett went through in the 1980s, turning around Salomon Brothers after trading fraud sent Congress on a witch hunt. There are, as Jamie said for a CEO, no road maps.

“I wanted to explain to people that you need to get past your fears right this minute—not next week, not next month, but right now. And I will represent you,” Bob said, leaning in. “I had one person, several of their kids were beat up. One man said to me, tears in his eyes, I just felt badly for him because he couldn’t control it, he said, ‘Bob, my third-grade daughter was asked to stand in front of the class and the teacher said, ‘This young lady’s father is an executive with AIG and they destroyed the whole financial system and isn’t that sad what her father did.’ And he said, ‘Bob, what am I going to do?’. . . One of our employees in financial products wrote me a note thanking me for his career and everything else and he wrote, I’ve got it here,” Bob said, pulling up his BlackBerry. “‘The work you have performed here has been absolutely amazing and for me it started with your first trip to Wilton,’ which would have been August 10. The first day I’m working I went to Wilton, Connecticut to speak to the folks there whom at the time was the center of blame for what it seems was everything that was wrong with America. But that’s just one person, one example of many e-mails I get.”

“Do people just e-mail you freely like that?” I asked.

“Yeah, I get lots of e-mails.”

“Do you try to answer all of them?”

“I answer every one of them.”

“You do?”

“Immediately . . . except if I’m in a meeting for three or four hours. I go through my e-mails pretty quickly because I think that’s the most important thing . . . getting a response from me is a big deal. I get that it’s because it’s the CEO of AIG. Getting a response right away from me versus the secretary is a big deal.

“In the old days I used to get mail sent to me, I would handwrite a note on it. I don’t do that anymore because I just don’t have time. I made sure I wrote a note, I signed it, ‘Bob, thanks for the input,’ whatever. And they would have it on their desk. They would say, ‘Bob just sent this . . . you think he doesn’t read this shit? Man, look at that, he wrote it with his own handwriting.’ No form letter, no secretary, it’s my handwriting that says that son of a bitch had to sit down and write that. And some days it gets hard but it spreads the word that I’m accessible, so don’t screw around because he’s everywhere and you don’t know where I’m going to be and when I’m going to be there. And that’s part of keeping an organization on its toes.”

When I asked Bob what it’s like to be a CEO, he thought about it for a while and replied, “You know the Sword of Damocles?”

I shook my head no. Bob went on to recount the ancient Greek tale of the courtier named Damocles who envied his king.

“He said to the king, ‘Oh, you have the best life and it’s great, and look at all the lavish parties and the riches you have.’ And the king said, ‘Well, if you want to know, have a life like mine, I’ll show you what it’s like.’ And so what he did was, he had him sitting at the table feasting with them, and then he looked above him and he saw this giant sword above his head and it was hanging by a thread. And he realized that the thread could snap at any second and he would die. And he was very uncomfortable about sitting underneath that sword, but he got the picture. And so when you’re a CEO the problem is you have that sword hanging over your head at all times. And you can make the mistake of thinking that you’ve made it, but it’s not a good thought to have. You’ve got to figure out a way to keep moving and keep leading and recognizing that everybody in this company now looks to you for their leadership and you have to be responsible for their lives. You can come in and the place is in good shape, a lot of people around. You go to your office and enjoy the trappings and the fancy lunches and dinners and the planes and so on. But sooner or later you’ve got to run the company. And sooner or later when something goes wrong in the night, you’ve got to figure out how to fix things.”

********

Anne Mulcahy, the former CEO of Xerox, joked that private equity is the place where CEOs go to die.

“I said that’s the one thing I won’t do,” she said. “That’s like a near-death experience going into private equity for a retired CEO.”

She raised an interesting point. What happens after you’ve been king or queen of your domain?

Ask the Boss: What Holds People Back?
With all this talk about what CEOs look for when they hire, I began asking them about what holds people back in their careers?
Chris Burch, the retailing CEO, at first said fear. But then as he talked, he revealed a secondary issue that I could relate to as well.
“I think the number one mistake [people] make is they’re concerned about their careers, how they’re perceived, and I think they should be concerned about, ultimately, do they make their boss’ life better?” he said. “Do they make their customer’s life better? And do they make the company better? And I think those people always move to the top. And they also are willing to say it straight.”
It made me think back to what I learned about likability and the four magical words one can ask someone else, “How can I help?” Perhaps that phrase is not said enough and I admit that, at more times than I’d like to mention, I’ve been remiss in that area. Aim to go into your meetings, lunches, and conversations with the idea of how you can help and you’d be surprised at the responses after a while. Oftentimes your help is not needed but you become the person who is seen as helpful to the organization, rather than the problem child. I’m reminded of what Bruce Ratner told me, how sometimes he keeps average employees simply because they’re the “glue” people. They keep the morale up and the organization together.
“I think the biggest thing that holds people back is they don’t tell people what they need or want—what I call ‘Ta-Da’ moments,” said Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL. “They do everything in the background and show up with work done and ‘Ta-Da!’ They don’t take into account most people want to help. Before there were organizational charts, before PowerPoints, in the beginning of the industrial age, there were no review processes. It was business on the fly—you had to give constant feedback, there was a fluidity between managers and employees. Nowadays, people build up their whole thing to communicating once a year versus having an ongoing ecosystem. I think that holds people back.”
It was an interesting concept, as I myself have committed this crime, and I have seen plenty of others, men and women, do the same thing. Part of that is a fear of raising any issues with superiors. “If I quietly do my work, then my boss will appreciate when it’s all done,” the thinking goes. While your intentions may mean well, you may come across as controlling or secretive or not a team player. Another issue is what Sam Zell and Martin Sorrell both described as a disease among the stars of an organization: They want to keep all the information to themselves until they can reveal it without someone stealing their ideas or to use it for bartering purposes. That got one woman fired by Sam, and Martin has had to constantly manage the hoarding tendencies in his own company.
“I think the biggest mistake people make is they don’t have their own rudder,” Teresa Taylor said. “They don’t have their own ethics and their own morals clear. That’s usually what gets anyone in trouble . . . it’s like their heads get too big, their ethics get out of whack, and then pretty soon, before you know it, they’re kind of bending the rules, they’re bending the expense accounts . . . all these things sort of start happening.”

Many of us are happy to retire into a quiet life, have the freedom to travel or pursue our hobbies and spend time with our families. But CEOs, leaders, driven type-A personalities are a little different—instead of going from zero to 60 everyday, they’re suddenly on the bus again when they leave the top job. Much was made when Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, saw his security detail disappear overnight once he lost the election to President Barack Obama. Using the codenames “Javelin” for Mitt and “Jockey” for Ann Romney, on the morning after the Tuesday vote, the Secret Service radioed out, “Javelin, Jockey details, all posts, discontinue.” Days later, a photo emerged on the Internet of Romney pumping his own gas.

Al Gore famously got fat and grew a beard after he slipped into the post-election blues. Others become the opposite, like Jimmy Carter, whose disastrous presidency energized him to prove to the world he was fit to be president, even though he was voted out of the White House after one term.

When I ask some CEOs about life after the office, one didn’t even want to contemplate it. Another mentioned a welcome relief of being able to play golf and hang around with family and friends whenever he chose. Several did not rule out another job in the future, albeit at a smaller company or a startup. And almost all joined boards or became advisers to yes, private equity firms. Warren Buffett has joked they’d have to carry him out of the offices of Berkshire. He has no plans of ever retiring.

“My question [for other CEOs] would be more about life after,” Anne said. “It’s a very consuming role and no matter how hard you try to say that’s not my life, it is our life. And I would love to talk to just some people who could provide some wisdom on the life after about how do you kind of translate all of that great stuff. And you literally go from being so important to not being important at all. I’ve got to tell you, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I’d love to talk to people who’ve done it well.”

After leaving Xerox, Anne became chairman of the Save the Children fund. She has also been rumored from time to time for a Washington appointment.

As other people might put it, these are high-class problems to have. After all, a CEO usually won’t have to worry about money for the rest of his or her life. They’ll always circulate among the powerful and elite. But this question raises an important topic for the rest of us.

How do you create a purposeful life when one of the main purposes in your life is gone?

It’s a difficult topic for anyone but even more difficult for people who have achieved great heights in their careers, leading to that common but true phrase: the higher you rise, the harder you can fall. Stories abound of movie stars who crash and burn into a world of drugs and addiction, or Olympic athletes who end up stocking shelves at the Walmart. Going back to the sports/CEO analogy, many former football and basketball players hit hard financial times after the games are over, spending the rest of their lives trying to recapture the glory of their twenties. Imagine if your career peaked in your twenties? What would you do to top that?

There are, of course, no clear answers. The fact is, a job can end at any time. It’s up to you to always figure out what’s next?

Sometimes the answer is you just always plan that you do something else. Here is where entrepreneurs and women have a leg up over other people. Entrepreneurs do so because it’s in their DNA to always think about what else to do. They can’t sit in one place for long. Nolan Bushnell, the Atari founder, declared with not the least bit of self-consciousness that the current company he is working on, BrainRush, will be his biggest success yet. Brainrush is an educational tool for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade that helps them sharpen their mental skills, the way chess playing does for Nolan. You can say it’s a personal obsession of his, as he confessed his biggest fear is his brain turning to mush. “I want to be as sharp as Aunt Betty was at age 103.”

“I believe that [BrainRush] will be explosive during the first half of 2014 and that I will sell the company in the fall of 2014 for a whole bunch of money,” he said. “I have a really good sense of how things transpire and how you can market and get people to adopt. We have proven that we can teach kids ten times faster using this software. The results are so extraordinary. I know all the big players in the education field, I know what people think the obstacles are; we have ways to get rid of those obstacles. It sounds cocky, but I kind of get it.”

Women have an advantage because, frankly speaking, the minute we enter the workforce, we have hanging over us the moment when we wonder what we do after children. I hit that moment in my late twenties. I never considered not working but the knowledge that at some point, I would take a three- to six-month break in my job made me think: Do I want to go back to my job? Do I want to try ­something new? Do I like what I’m doing and can I see myself doing it for the next twenty to thirty years? (For a brief moment, my sister and I dreamed we’d start a baby gifts company but that idea never made it off the paper.)

Ask the Boss: What’s It Like to Fire People?
We may know people who’ve been fired but what’s it really like to fire people?
Harvey Golub ran American Express for eight years and had to go through several restructurings.
“[Firings and layoffs] are really different,” Harvey said. “Firing somebody is an individual action. So if you’re firing somebody because they’re incompetent, or they’re unethical, or they stole, you’re doing it because they’re not quite up to the job. In some jobs you can tolerate some mediocre performance.”
I asked him if he ever wanted to keep people he laid off because they were, unfortunately, employed in one division.
“Early in my tenure at American Express, we had to restructure parts of the operation, and one of the things we had to do is close an entire operating center. It was in Jacksonville, Florida, so there were 2,000 people laid off. Many of them were excellent people. What we did in that process was we, among other things, offered anybody there who had exceptional performance the right to bid on other jobs in other centers in Atlanta and Greensboro and South Florida and so on so that they could find other jobs. But there were excellent people in that operation.”
“You had to lose them,” I said.
“We had to lose them. We just closed the entire center. There was no choice. And those are terrible things, too. So you do them in the most humane way and you try and make the process as easy as possible and you try to do them in good times.”
“So people can find another job?”
He nodded.
“Did you ever have guilt?”
“No, I didn’t have guilt, because my responsibility was the entire company. Sometimes you do things like, do you cut off this limb or do you wait and let the whole tree die? You have to make those decisions because you don’t want the tree to die. So you don’t feel guilt. You feel sorry.”
In 2012, 1.5 million people were involved in mass layoffs—the elimination of 50 jobs or more in a single event, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Companies like Cisco, IBM, and Walmart have all had to let their people go in the last few years. In some cases, the circumstances were economics. In others, it was bad management. It didn’t matter if it was a startup or an old, established corporation—­companies all go through these cycles. Even young entrepreneurs eventually turn into “The Man” they grew up despising.
Like Ben Huh, the CEO of www.Cheezburger.com, a website that posts outrageous clips of animals. He laid off a third of his staff and told Inc. magazine about it.
Twenty-four people were let go, bringing our head count to forty-two. It was the most difficult week I’ve ever experienced. Often, when faced with a problem, you want to run in the other direction. It’s like seeing a lion in the jungle. But I have to do what is best for the company, even if it sucks emotionally.

Around the time I interviewed her, Sallie Krawcheck, one of the most prominent female executives on Wall Street, was contemplating the what’s-next question. She’d already been fired in a public fashion from two big Wall Street firms but still managed to leave with her reputation intact. At Citigroup, she was ousted for a noble cause: advocating for the small investor. At Bank of America, she was turning a profit at the wealth management division but new management came in and cleared house.

Sallie told me how after her first firing, a senior woman executive said her career was over. I was shocked to hear that—it would have to take some balls (pardon my language) to tell someone that. I asked if she knew the woman well.

“No, no, it wasn’t somebody I knew very well. It was a pretty prominent woman and what was fascinating is she didn’t say it meanly. It was empathetically and sympathetically, as in ‘I’m sorry that your career is over.’ Now . . . look at the evidence. Name another woman in financial services who has been publically fired and then come back to another big role?”

“Not very many at all,” I said, trying to think of any. There was Zoe Cruz, the former co-president of Morgan Stanley, who left and nobody heard about again. Erin Callan, the chief financial officer, of Lehman Brothers, who famously was put out on stage as a young, rising star during the financial crisis, only to be run over and thrown out when it was clear she had no idea what was really on the balance sheet of the firm.

“I can’t think of any,” Sallie replied. “So her comment comes from the history and the background.”

“What did you say to her when she said that?”

“What are you going to do?” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s a bummer. Oh, well. I’ll show you.’”

She laughed again. “I’ll show you.”

Sallie was coy about what she’d do next. Wall Street was still in her blood but clearly she was hankering for a different direction. She alluded to meetings in Washington and on the West Coast. I didn’t doubt she was a woman in demand—the reality is that prominent businesswomen are very scarce. There are only 20 women CEOs out of 500-listed Standard & Poor’s companies and their public relations departments are unusually busy fielding requests to speak at almost every event.

A few months later, it was announced Sallie was buying the women’s networking group, 85 Broads, from a former Goldman Sachs ­executive. Sallie was embracing her new role as a champion of women in the workplace.

In a New York Magazine piece, Sallie was quoted describing her career switch: “The women’s issue kept popping up,” she says. “I ­consider myself to be a recovering research analyst, and the numbers are just so damn compelling.”

At the end of the piece, Sallie described exactly the issue that hits all CEOs when they leave, the issue that Anne Mulcahy was looking for wisdom and advice on, the topic that we will all confront, whether we love our jobs: What do we do next? Because, as Sallie described at the end of the magazine article, when she left Bank of America, Christmas cards delivered “were down by 95 percent.”

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