Not really. There are a lot of external factors that could explain the difference in the company's performance. Different time, different customers, different overall market strength, different availability in capital, different interest rates. You can't pin the company's success or failure entirely on the CEO, and there is not that much correlation between CEO compensation and company success.
I think a lot of people could do Nadella’s job and you’d see similar company performance. In fact I’d be so bold to say that the higher up on the totem pole you go, the more people could do an equal or better job. The world has few CEOs simply because the world has few companies, not because the job is particularly difficult or requires niche, rare skill.
We love to hero worship, though, and the fiction we consume loves to uplift That One Person who won the day, downplaying everyone else who contributed to that win, and the environment in which the win happened.
Nadella changed the focus and direction of Microsoft. The company increased in value 10x. Maybe "anyone could have done that", in hindsight. Heck, if I went back in time with a detailed copy of Apple's history, I could have done what Jobs did.
But without that guide, I would have destroyed Apple. I'm just not that good.
All I am saying is we don't know that it was his decisions that caused the value increase and not something else, and we can't know because we can't do a controlled experiment in another otherwise identical universe to rule out other factors.
Not really. There are a lot of external factors that could explain the difference in the company's performance. Different time, different customers, different overall market strength, different availability in capital, different interest rates. You can't pin the company's success or failure entirely on the CEO, and there is not that much correlation between CEO compensation and company success.
I think a lot of people could do Nadella’s job and you’d see similar company performance. In fact I’d be so bold to say that the higher up on the totem pole you go, the more people could do an equal or better job. The world has few CEOs simply because the world has few companies, not because the job is particularly difficult or requires niche, rare skill.
We love to hero worship, though, and the fiction we consume loves to uplift That One Person who won the day, downplaying everyone else who contributed to that win, and the environment in which the win happened.