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CEO Lessons | 47<br />
ceremonial clock. The award was Friday, and Mike fired Bruce<br />
over the weekend. Monday morning an e-mail went out explaining<br />
that Bruce was gone. We were all shocked and confused. (I’ll<br />
spare you the details, but I don’t think Bruce should have been<br />
fired. Later we hired him back.) One engineer didn’t miss a beat.<br />
He sent out a company-wide e-mail with only one line: “Don’t<br />
take the clock.”<br />
Seared into my mind, whenever I’m going to give someone<br />
an award, is this simple lesson: First check that their job<br />
is secure.<br />
••<br />
The only real power a Board <strong>of</strong> Directors has is to hire and fire<br />
the CEO. The board can give advice, but if the CEO ignores<br />
it, there’s not much the board can do. The CEO is around all<br />
the time, but the board meets only once a month in start-ups<br />
or once a quarter in larger companies. If the CEO is going the<br />
wrong direction and won’t listen to reason, then the board’s<br />
only meaningful recourse is to fire him—or her, except at the<br />
moment I’m thinking <strong>of</strong> Mike.<br />
Recently I was a guest lecturer at Stanford with Jeff Chambers,<br />
who is a VC. I took the opportunity to ask him, “When<br />
is the right time to fire a CEO?” He said, “You should fire the<br />
CEO the first time it occurs to you. If a founder or vice president<br />
comes to the board and says to fire the CEO, you have<br />
to take into account that they probably went through a lot<br />
before that point. They are there every day and not acting on<br />
a whim. Whatever is going on is a serious issue and will likely<br />
get worse.” (Here, perhaps, the bull <strong>of</strong> the title is a metaphor<br />
for founding CEOs.)
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