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