The Rowboat CEO

Watermen, who look astern while they row the boat ahead . . .

row hard after glory, but with their face another way.

—Plutarch

Many CEOs of early-stage companies function as what I call Rowboat CEOs. They row hard while facing backward, and they don’t do a great job of looking over their shoulder at what’s ahead.

In some ways, the rowboat approach is necessary for the startup leader. When you’re getting a business off the ground, you have to supply a lot of elbow grease yourself. You must look at the here-and-now, the “what just happened?,” so you can iterate fast. After all, the distant future doesn’t matter too much if you’re not going to be around by next month.

But there’s a real problem when Rowboat CEOs transfer their approach to a company at scale. Once you’re past the startup phase (whether your startup has grown into a real organization or you’ve stepped into the CEO role at a bigger enterprise), furiously rowing toward glory while facing backward is a decidedly inappropriate appr…