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Thinking more that scientists might make the best CEOs, and the best CEOs might study how scientists do their work. Thread 👇
There are many models for leaders -- military generals, captains of sports teams, politicians, parents of a big family. Management books pick those metaphors to help people learn to lead.
Maybe the leadership gurus have been picking the wrong metaphors. The old models share something in common: The CEO, in the general-captain-senator-parent model, is always the One Who Knows.
Maybe a better way to think of a CEO is someone who's an expert at not knowing. Someone who can figure out what's worth knowing, and then skillfully separate reality from fiction -- so maybe the best way to think about a modern CEO is as a scientist.
Marie Curie, boss CEO role model? 
That scientist's skill (of knowing how to discover the truth) drives companies big and small. Startups quest to find a repeatable business model, so the leader's entire job is to unearth the truth of what will work.
In big companies, despite most of the *effort* of leadership going to managing what is, most of the *value* of leadership stems from what will be. Although plenty of groups inside Google focus on growing search, Alphabet's leaders obsess over the other bets.
The most valuable task of any company is betting on the future. Betting on the future -- whether you do it by launching something new, buying a company, or however -- is a completely different thing than optimizing the stuff that already works.
What does it take for scientists, or any leader, to bet on the future?
Betting on the future means having a point of view on what that future might look like. Without the imagination of a new theory, it's difficult to know what to bring into being. That depends on an attitude of confident optimism.
Betting on the future means having a testing mentality. The world is smarter than we are. We need its lessons to know what might work, and that depends on a skeptical attitude - preferring to disprove than to swallow whole.
Betting on the future means having a team that does all this and coheres, even without triumph. It's difficult to celebrate tests that fail to work out, and it's just as difficult to test things if you are working alone.
Assembling and keeping a team built around not-knowing is harder than one built around winning or "hitting goals." Motivating people without using money as the only carrot -- that's hard, too.
Betting on the future means winning the resources to see if something works before it does. Every bet has a bettor (who believes it might work) and a backer (who pays for the experiment). Sometimes those are the same person.
Betting on the future means having an ability to drive progress without certainty. How do you keep to a schedule when there's no certainty of an outcome?
Betting on the future means matching the level of effort (in time or money or shelf space, or anything) to the likely value of the bet working. Overspending on assets of low value happens in business every day.
The good CEO, like the good scientist, can suss out how many eggs to put in each of many baskets--and knows that sometimes you have to buy the already-proven experiments others have undertaken.
Who specializes in this work of not-knowing every day? Scientists.
Scientists are hardly the soloists in a white lab coat of a kid's imagination, sitting over a petri dish with a pipette. They make their careers by building a team - their lab and their collaborators.
The careers of the people who work for scientists depend on whether the lab's experiments work, and also on how much responsibility the principal investigator (a.k.a. "chief scientist") lends them (and how much they nurture those future scientists).
The principal investigators manage their team's personalities, self-interest, noble impulses, and arbitrary madness. (Sounds like a CEO!)
Scientists apply for grants to fund the experiments they want to perform, by inspiring or convincing their backers (whether in government, philanthropy, at a university, or just rich people) to underwrite their experiments.
The scientific method is our civilization's best way to find the limits of reality. Theorists squeeze their brains until they pop out a new way things might be; experimentalists take that hypothesized way and try to disprove it.
Of course the profession of science has a thousand pitfalls. Peer review problems, repeatability, outright falsification,egos abounding, diversity not abounding, and careerists who value self-progress above truth, et. al.
Still, a CEO's main responsibility -- in either a new startup (where the lean startup method is, roughly, the business version of the scientific method) or an established organization evolving -- is to bet on the future.
All the other CEO things--a team, a vision, capital ---they all add up to bringing those future bets to life.
The profession that best bets on humanity's future- - as informed by culture, philosophy, history, and all of the humanities' humanity- - is science.
Maybe CEO's should learn from the best scientists on how to do their job better. (And if you're a scientist who wants to become a CEO, our venture fund invests in startups…) bloombergbeta.com
P.S. I'd like to better understand how to apply the scientific method myself. Maybe by reconsidering the busted thing that is the traditional business plan - there might be a better way. also.roybahat.com/instead-of-a-b…
Thanks to @BobbyKasthuri who put these ideas in my head, @NormaPadron_ who expressed them first. And to the @SchmidtFellows for exposing me to some of the most promising scientists anywhere.
And always to @carmeldea, my writing coach.
Full post here: also.roybahat.com/ceo-scientist-…
