Choosing a leader

 

So, are companies worse than they used to be at choosing good leaders? Certainly, given the importance of the top job, companies sometimes appear to select their leaders in unsatisfactory ways. They rarely advertise for a boss or select anyone from another country (apart from in Britain, were 32 of the cheif executives of the FTSE 2100 firms are not British). Moreover, they rarely appoint anyone who has been the CEO of another large public company. Of course, successfully picking a leader has always been tricky because the job requires at last two quite different skills. Like the fox, a CEO must know lot of little things and must manage the key day-to-day aspects of the business. But like the hedgehog, he must also know one big thing: every three or for years, he will have to take a substantial strategic decisin, which may fatally damage the business if he gets it wrong. Plenty of giants, such as Cable&Wireless and AT&T, have had leaders who passed the fox test but failed the hedgehog one.