Alpha CEOs
And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with Me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
-Jesus Christ
The concept of being alpha is such an odd subject.
I used to think it was black and white. If you’re alpha, you’re in charge of the conversation. You’re the leader. You leverage your charisma to get others to do your bidding. Your prospective sexual partners can’t help but be attracted to you. You’re a man. If you’re beta, you’re a pushover, a cuck… or whatever they call submissive men these days.
There are studies that try to refute the existence of alpha males. Looking at how society operates and how people and animals tend to procreate... that’s a ridiculous notion. Of course there are alphas and betas in any society. From an evolutionary perspective, they can be viewed as different mating strategies. But people either way overvalue or way undervalue the concept.
I’m an ENTJ, and most leaders tend to exhibit qualities of ENTJs. Are we mixing correlation with causation here? Yes, to start a company you have to be aggressive. You have to believe something can be done that has never been done before. It’s audacious. But do you have to be the leader in every conversation? Do you have to always tell everyone what to do? The buck does stop with the CEO.
A successful serial entrepreneur friend once told me that betting on a founding CEO is betting that they’ll make the correct decision 70% of the time and figure out quickly when they fuck up on the inevitable 30%. It’s impossible to make every decision correctly as you never have all the info, and the velocity of decisions you have to make as a founding CEO is massive. There are some very important decisions and lots of minor decisions where if you mess them up badly enough, it destroys the company.
If you delay making a critical decision, that also counts as a decision and in most circumstances, is the worst option. When stalling is not a proper tactic, I only delay making a decision if I’m actively gathering more information for a one-way door decision. Jeff Wilke, former SVP at Amazon breaks down decisions:
We think about one-way doors, and two-way doors. A one-way door is a place with a decision if you walk through, and if you don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back. You can’t get back to the initial state. A two-way door, you can walk through and can see what you find, and if you don’t like it, you can walk right back to the door and return to the state that you had before. We think those two-way door decisions are reversible, and we want to encourage employees to make them. Why would we need anything more than the lightest-weight approval process for those two-way doors?
Back to the alpha topic-- I don’t think one needs to always be hardcore on at all times. There are CEOs with reality distortion fields who are larger than life characters. But there are more CEOs who aren’t larger than life. I’ve met tons of them, even in the world of finance-- one was the softest spoken person I’ve met in my life, employs thousands of the best data scientists and researchers, and is also one of the wealthiest people in the world. Of course we’re going to notice the loud, charismatic CEOs… because they’re loud and charismatic! It was a shocking realization that there are more empire building CEOs who are extremely thoughtful and quiet.
Just as there isn’t only one way to build a company, there isn’t one way to be a CEO. Yes, there are certain archetypes that work, but if you don’t perfectly fit that archetype, be true to yourself. It sounds stupidly simple, but I think the CEO has to be the best version of themselves, which will reflect itself on the culture of the company.
In my social life, my version of being alpha evolved into being true to myself. If I don’t want to go out and socialize, I don’t. If I want to meet someone new or say hi to someone, I do it. If I want to relax and listen to my friends tell funny stories, I do that. If I want to tell my friends a funny story or thing I recently learned, I do that. As I’ve gotten older, I feel less and less the need for validation from my peers. I care most about my deep friendships. I care next about things I’m building, experiences, and ideas.
As a CEO, I hope to always be true to myself and never feel like I have to put up a facade to be or act like other prototypical CEOs. I never liked black turtlenecks anyway.