This is my response to the latest episode from This Week in Startups podcast. The talk was done by Joel Spolsky, a founder of Stack Overflow and Trello. The latter was acquired by Atlassian for $425 million as we all know.
During this 50 minutes long conversation, I particularly liked the below statement.
“I rarely worked more than 8 hours a day in my entire career because I figured if I’m working more than 8 hours a day then I have failed to delegate something.”
A delegation, in other words, letting someone else do a job for you is one of the fundamental tasks that a CEO needs to do. If a CEO can leave the office before anyone, it is a good sign that the CEO is actually doing the right job.
Instead, the CEO should spend 100% of his time for hiring people smarter than him and making sure a company doesn’t run out of money. Telling a vision and defining a long-term goal is another thing only the CEO can do.
If you are a CEO working more than 8 hours a day or doing jobs other than ones stated above, then you are not doing the right job. You need to hire people to whom you can delegate a job. You need to finance in order to hire these people. You need to tell them a vision and a long-term goal so they don’t lose their way.