CEOs are Just Glorified Sales Reps

My recent post "Pay Sales Reps More Than CEOs!" suggested that the job of the CEO isn't all that important, so CEOs shouldn't command gigantic salaries.

Needless to say, some people don't see it that way, so let me elaborate a little.

In a recent New York Times business column, Ben Stein pointed out that most people in the high offices of government are average people, and that even the "best and brightest" make dumb mistakes.

What's true of government is certainly true in the business world. I've interviewed hundreds of CEOs and, let me tell you, your average CEO is of, well..., average intelligence. At best.

And that's OK because, frankly, the job just ain't all that difficult.

Don't believe me? How about believing a couple of the most talented CEOs in the business world?

The late Lew Platt, who was CEO of Hewlett-Packard during one of its strongest growth periods, once told me that he characterized the CEO job as follows:

"We are a very decentralized company. We're broken down into relatively small business units. We give people who run the businesses a lot of freedom in terms of making decisions about what they ought to be doing. We don't try to steer everything from the top of the company. The role of the CEO is to make the invisible visible and to manage the white spaces. The CEO is responsible for the sense of connectedness within the company, the white spaces being those things between the functions or the businesses on the organization chart."

Similarly, Mitchell Kertzman, former CEO of Sybase, Powersoft, and Liberate Technologies, once told me how HE characterizes the CEO job:

"There was a time when I did every job in this company. I wrote the programs, I sent out the bills, I did the accounting, I answered the phone, I made the coffee. As the company has grown, I do fewer and fewer of those jobs. And that's just as well, because I was certainly less competent at them than most of the people who are doing them now. I'm the reverse of the Peter Principle in the sense that I've finally risen to my level of competence, which is that I don't do anything very well and now what I do extremely well, which is nothing.

"What am I good at? I'm good at motivation. I'm good at recruiting. I'm good at representing the company. I'm good at giving speeches. I'm good at meeting with customers, meeting with the press, working with the financial community."

The problem is that people assume that, as you go up the management chain, the job keeps getting harder and harder. And, therefore, the guy who does that job must be really, really smart, and thus worth all the extra lucre.

But is that really true? Do you remember when Ken Lay admitted that he didn't understand what was going on inside Enron? A lot of people were so hypnotized by his job title that they didn't believe him.

But it was probably true. Plenty of CEOs are empty suits.

Look, most CEOs have about the same relationship with their direct reports that your boss has with you. In fact, it's probably harder managing you and your pals than managing a bunch of saavy VPs and SVPs.

Let me put it another way. What's the hardest job in a hospital? Running the bureaucracy? Or cutting into patient's brains and removing tumors?

Similarly, what's the hardest job at NASA? Running the bureaucracy? Or designing something that allows an astronaut to sit safely on a 200 ton firecracker?

You probably see where I'm going here. Being CEO ain't brain surgery and it ain't rocket science.

So let's get the CEO pay scale out of cloud cuckoo land and start paying CEOs something reasonable, OK?