5 Challenges of Co-CEOs

This week, Oracle announced its new CEO.

Surprise: there’s two of them!

It’s a little like the birth announcement of twins, but in this case you don’t get two bundles of joy. You get, potentially, a whole mess of issues that comes with having a shared corner office.

Before I get into the problems of the co-CEO arrangement, let me clarify that I’m not saying I know better than Oracle’s board. If any company could make co-CEOs work, it would probably be Oracle. Larry Ellison remains as Chairman and CTO to provide continuity and the two new CEOs, Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, have genuinely complementary expertise as veteran leaders of different divisions within the company. There’s an infrastructure-versus-applications division between them that may minimize the overlap that would doom other co-CEO arrangements.

I’m certainly rooting for them.

Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, incoming co-CEOs

With that out of the way, onto the potential problems.

First, as Pilot CEO Waseem Daher notes¹, a co-CEO arrangement is not generally a good sign of the company’s state:

I’m not enthusiastic about the concept of co-CEOs because what it typically means is that the founders were afraid to have the hard conversation about which person will ultimately have the final say. Or, even worse, they did have the conversation but couldn’t reach agreement.

Great point. As an investor I would certainly feel more confident with governance that could pick one leader going forward. (See also: More People, More Problems?)

That’s because there are some pretty clear pitfalls of having two CEOs where there would typically be one. For example: