MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How Tech CEOs Are Redefining the Top Job

Pioneering leaders roll up their sleeves, create, and stay relevant.

A decade or two ago, CEOs could be in their offices with spreadsheets, executing on strategy,” he said. “Now, if you’re not out listening to the market and catching market transitions, & if you’re not understanding that you need to constantly reinvent yourself every three to five years, you as a CEO will not survive.

Indeed, looking at how executives spend their time reveals what they consider essential to their role. So we studied a small but revealing sample of the most highly regarded CEOs in recent history — Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and the late Steve Jobs of Apple — in search of commonalities. While executives at different companies necessarily spend their time in different ways to some extent, we found a key similarity among our subjects: All of them were directly involved in inventing and producing offerings even as they steered their respective ships.

About the Author

Boris Groysberg (@bgroysberg) is the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the coauthor, with Michael Slind, of Talk, Inc. (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Tricia Gregg is a researcher at Harvard Business School.

Learn more about MIT SMR.