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BSG From the Boardroom

A curated selection of executive opportunities, industry highlights, and unique insights in executive search.

    The Most Common Reason Venture-Backed CEOs Fail

    After quite a bit of discussion was sparked on an earlier blog post in March around the 7 Reasons why early and growth-stage CEOs fail in technology-driven innovation-stage companies, we thought we'd get the venture capital perspective.  Below are the results.  The two biggest reasons behind CEO failure revolved around a CEO's inability to balance revenues and burn-rate (23%), tied with the CEO's inability to hire well at the VP level, with repeat VP-level failure/turnover (also ~23%).  The balance of forced ranking of CEO failure include categories such as--

    - New CEO didn't integrate with rest of incumbent team

    - Business model changed (different horses for different courses)

    - Leadership fatigue (plateauing company for too long a period)

    - CEO "Peter Principle," and

    - CEO getting sideways with Board of Director(s)/ board chemistry

    vc-survey-graphic-results-march-2009-why-ceos-fail1

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    -by Clark Waterfall on Apr 27, 2009 11:29:17 PM

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