When I’m trying to explain the differences between the CEO and the Chairman of an organization, I like to use this analogy: It’s like the two of them are driving a car.
The CEO must be allowed to operate the throttle and steer the car. The chairman sits in the passenger seat. He’s there to stamp on the brakes or grab the wheel if required. The chairman and the board should be consulted on the destination, but they must not interfere while the CEO is driving, and they should leave the actual route to the executive team.

Conventional wisdom is that new CEOs need to boost earnings per share in two years or they’re out. However recent findings from Booz & Company’s latest CEO Turnover report seem to suggest otherwise. Dismissals are happening, but they’re more often caused by board infighting rather than poor CEO performance. Using ten years of data they had collected, researchers Per-Ola Karlsson, Gary L. Neilson, and Juan Carlos Webster found:
For all CEOs, the likelihood of being dismissed for poor performance in a given year is only 2.1 percent. Given this data, it is not surprising that the correlation between stock performance and dismissal is generally not significant. Indeed, the very worst-performing chief executives – those in the bottom decile, whose companies’ two-year stock price had fallen by 25 percent in absolute terms and whose companies had under­performed their regional industry peers by 45 percent – [...]

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist,  compared two studies . One said that happy workers are more successful, and the other said that sad workers are more productive. His conclusion:
Now, if you were to describe the job of a CEO versus the job of a lower level worker, I think you might say the CEO needs to be successful (as opposed to productive) whereas the lower level worker needs to be productive (as opposed to successful). Ideally, everyone should be both successful and productive, but in terms of importance, you would prefer a successful CEO over one who has more meetings, or however else you would measure “productivity” in that job. And a factory worker, for example, needs to be productive more than he needs to “succeed,” if success even has meaning in that sort of job.
So it follows from the science that [...]

Speaking of Pascal Levensohn, he’s also written a very good guide for founders of startups who have new responsibilities and boards to look after. The guide is called “A Simple Guide to the Basic Responsibilities of VC-Backed Company Directors.”
During the early stages of a company’s founding, it’s especially important for leaders to get everyone on the same page so that all stakeholders share the same vision.

In January the CEO of Bear Sterns was ‘demoted’ from CEO to Chairman of the Board.   Companies can defined these roles however they like, though I don’t think this was a very good idea. I agree with venture capitalist Pascal Levensohn, who said :
Keeping former CEOs on the board of your company is generally contra-indicated for several obvious reasons:
First, most former CEOs have strongly held continuing views and core beliefs as to how the company should continue to be run;
Second, it is emotionally very difficult for former CEOs to let go of such strongly held convictions; and
Third, people have a natural tendency to second-guess other people.

The chairman leads the board; the CEO doesn’t just report to him, the chairman hires or fires the CEO. The chairman is ultimately responsible for what the firm [...]

Earlier this month Carl Icahn started a blog  to discuss issues facing boards. Icahn has strong opinions and he doesn’t mince words:
“It is the board’s responsibility to hold a CEO accountable, and remove the CEO if he or she is not producing results. But exacting such a measure requires effort and strategic consideration, and boards are often too lazy and/or passive to rock the boat, especially since the company will continue to pay and pamper and even indemnify them under almost any circumstances. Board members receive expensive tickets to important sporting events, the theatre, and are also treated to use of the company’s fleet. Worst of all, the board itself is not made accountable because corporate board elections are generally a joke.”
Is it the board’s responsibility to hold a CEO accountable? I’d say in many cases it comes down to the [...]

What’s going on at Yahoo? Will CEO Jerry Yang, having just marked one year in the position , be around for much longer? It’s interesting to try to understand his mindset. After not accepting Microsoft’s offers to take over Yahoo, he upset shareholders; his personal desire to keep the company he built independent has destroyed a great deal of shareholder value.
He was holding out for a higher offer—was he aware of some value in Yahoo that the casual observer is not? Sometimes CEOs can adopt a longer term view to the challenges they face and put current concerns in perspective—we found this among senior managers with a great deal of executive accountability in a Cranfield study of the NHS Trust.
But has the potential merger made Yang lose all perspective? He recently wasn’t able clearly answer the question of what Yahoo does . His longevity at Yahoo remains to be seen.