I hope I'm not double posting, but I found this via pmarca, and it was so useful and on point I wanted to share.

Double posts are no problem. It helps to see good things multiple times.

Set goals, push people hard, listen, settle disagreements.

That's easy to say and hard to do.

If the CEO job was easy, everyone would do it. And that would be silly.

I've seen firsthand CEO's who don't do these things, and the companies with those CEO's wither and die. If the CEO won't do the hard thing, how can s/he expect anyone else to?

Have you ever seen a great CEO?

I'm not sure I have.

no one is perfect, but seeing both Reid and Jeff at Linkedin gave me hope for real leadership.

I never saw Reid as interested in being CEO.

Jeff does seem to have it together, though I wonder what his vision for the future of LinkedIn is.

Reid wasn't interested in it once the company reached a certain size, but he sure could do the job. Perhaps his lack of interest helped-- he was able to delegate effectively to the talent he brought in. In many ways, he was a blueprint startup CEO: he built the company to a certain size, selected his replacement but stayed on as head of product to make sure it took, when the fit wasn't right, he stepped back in, selected the next replacement which was right. Very few startup CEO's make good CEO's at scale, which most of them deny (not naming names here.)

But how do we define "good" CEO? Stock price? Employee happiness? Customer satisfaction? How many good companies can we list?

Even John Chambers and Warren Buffett stumble sometimes with the stock price.

The best CEO ever, Steve Jobs, was also one of the world's biggest assholes.

Maybe we should agree that the job of CEO is too hard for anyone to be great at it.

Reid's strategy given that seems like a good one.