I would actually break successful CEOs into Developer CEO, Product CEO, and Sales CEO.
The Sales CEO tries to figure out what problems people have, and convince them that his company/product can solve those problems.
The Product CEO takes the hundreds of problems that exist in the market and come up with a product that solves a decent subset of those problems.
The Developer CEO figures out how to actually build such a product. They're responsible for solving hard technical problems and pushing the limits of what's possible.
(There is also a lot of overlap-a good CEO is usually an extreme generalist)
You are right. The old school industrial(and cartesian) thinking of separate things by classes, but imposing them to people just leaded to bureocracy , and people who cant see the whole scenario well, leading to bad decisions being made..
Its sad that our education systems still are compartimentized by areas.. with some avant-garde leading from some institutions of course being the exception..
we need broad and sistemic abrangence of knowledge, information and perspective.. the world is much more complicated these days.. it cant stand the expert alienation neurosis anymore.. or we all gonna fail to excel and live in the human kind golden future we all spect
Every successful founder-CEO I know of is a generalist who's especially good at one of these 3, and their cofounders or early hires make up for their weaknesses in the other two areas.
That said, at large companies the dynamic is different. I know of one excellent CEO at a 5000 person company who spent almost no time on product, market, or operations. Instead, he spent all his time on the human element. Making sure that there were strong training programs, making sure that it was easy to transfer from one department to another (and instituting policies that managers had to transfer star employees every two years or less), cutting through a lot of bureaucracy to make sure that star players could get promoted commensurate to their talents, etc. The company's performance and stock price skyrocketed during his tenure, and he was considered one of the best CEOs the company ever had.
The Sales CEO tries to figure out what problems people have, and convince them that his company/product can solve those problems.
The Product CEO takes the hundreds of problems that exist in the market and come up with a product that solves a decent subset of those problems.
The Developer CEO figures out how to actually build such a product. They're responsible for solving hard technical problems and pushing the limits of what's possible.
(There is also a lot of overlap-a good CEO is usually an extreme generalist)