CEO Essential Three

The other day I was doing something I don’t normally do.

Just kidding, I was doing exactly what I always do… thinking about the executive office. Studying other company models, reading about them, listening to pods by some of my favorites.

When I first launched this publication, I outlined the five responsibilities of a CEO:

This list isn’t wrong. But lately, as we’ve been talking about prioritization, I’ve wondered if it’s too comprehensive. Could it be less complicated?

Because in reality, some responsibilities are existential and others are consequential. The sequence determines whether the company becomes resilient, fragile or dead in the water.

Boiled down to its essence, the CEO job has three existential responsibilities (in order):

It’s a way of naming what actually matters in an enterprise with real stakes. Let’s dive into each one.

The CEO sits at altitude. Only they can see the horizon and only they can name the future. But altitude is actually a paradox because,

The higher they sit, the harder it is to see the ground.

You are the only one who truly understands this tension. Your job is to make the CEO’s vantage point functional and in service of the first and most critical responsibility.

In practice, that means:

It’s a rhythm that reminds me of Zazu and Mufasa from The Lion King.

We fly up to the perch to see what our principal sees, then back down to map the terrain. We shuttle between altitude and ground, gathering the information required to build a map they’ll never see firsthand.

Because if they don’t see the map clearly, they can’t steer clearly. And no one else can steer their kingdom.

But here’s the pattern I see often: busyness masquerading as progress. Vision work is slow, unbalanced, quiet, exhilarating, and brutal. Done well, you can labor for days and end up with one usable sentence.

My hunch is that this is why most leaders avoid it. It’s easier to bury themselves in “productive work” that feels satisfying when you check a box or the execution is linear.

Exceptional leaders don’t measure progress by how many boxes they checked. They measure progress by whether they had the courage to erase half the boxes that didn’t matter.

And as Chief, you are uniquely positioned to see when they’ve drifted and to guide them back to the work only they can do.

Even the most visionary CEO cannot scale themselves. They scale through people who can think, decide, and act without much oversight. And because people also make things more complicated, this is where the dysfunction surfaces first.

If you’ve ever heard a leader say “If I don’t do this it will never get done” or “I’m the only one who can do this.” That’s not brilliance, it’s a cry for help (and a liability). It signals an organization built on heroics instead of leadership.

Your role, as Chief, is to architect the conditions where leadership can exist:

Here’s the deeper, more uncomfortable layer: If your CEO is struggling to build leaders, don’t start with skill. Start with motive.

As Patrick Lencioni argues in The Motive, most leaders don’t fail because they lack competence. They fail because they never wanted the responsibility of developing other leaders in the first place.

I’m going to get real nasty with you for a minute.

A CEO who avoids coaching, avoids conflict, and avoids accountability doesn’t have a talent problem. They have a motive problem. And no amount of recruiting will fix that.

Some executives secretly believe their team should just “be like them” like competence is genetic. But no one becomes exceptional by proximity. The teams you admire aren’t 2x more committed to development. They’re 10x more obsessed with it, because they know talent doesn’t scale without intervention.

This means your real work isn’t just designing leadership systems. It’s confronting gently, directly, and repeatedly the uncomfortable truth that leadership requires vulnerability. And vulnerability is hell for insecure leaders.

If your CEO wants the perks of leadership but avoids the responsibility of developing other leaders, the organization will always default back to heroic individualism. And you will always be cleaning up after it.

A world-class leadership team is not the product of charismatic hiring or “high standards.” It is the outcome of a leader who is willing to do the unglamorous work of building people who might one day challenge them.

That is the moral and operational test of leadership. And it is why this responsibility breaks more companies than any spreadsheet ever will.

This one is obvious. But while money isn’t everything, it is the only thing whose absence is instantly fatal.

The reason this sits third is because it’s radically easier to protect capital when direction is clear and leadership is strong. Chaos is expensive. Avoidance is expensive. Weak teams are expensive.

Have you ever heard of a company dying from a lack of spreadsheets? Exactly. But they do die from a lack of perspective, honesty and urgency. Look at the 2008 US mortgage crisis. The data wasn’t hidden. The signals weren’t obscure. The danger was sitting in plain sight, but the entire system chose not to look. Money problems rarely hide. People just refuse to see them.

Your role is not to do finance. It’s to prevent your principal from being blindsided.

In practice, that means:

Sometimes your job is simply to make sure your principal never learns bad news from the people who send invoices. They should always hear it from you or the CFO equivalent.

And yes, you need enough financial literacy to notice existential signals. But not to model. To be able to diagnose.

Companies don’t collapse because the numbers were unknowable. They collapse because people chose optimism over truth, speed over clarity, and silence over accountability.

That’s why the most valuable person in the room is the one willing to ask the dumb question everyone else is silently praying no one asks.

Running out of money is never a math problem. It’s a courage problem.

Great companies are often held together by heroic Chiefs who change companies. They quietly bend history because they design systems where heroes are no longer required.

And while your principal carries the burden of the future, you carry the burden of making sure they survive long enough to build it.

If you’re really doing the job well, you’re not trying to look smart. You’re focused on what the role requires and on getting results. And that becomes an act of architecture: the slow, disciplined work of building clarity, alignment, and truth.

That is real leverage.

And that is the work of Zazu and every great advisor who has ever stood at altitude beside a king.

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