Fortune 500 CEO career path via finance

In your opinion, what is the proper route to being CEO of a fortune 500 company?

What sort of positions and experience in different sectors would make someone appealing as CEO? Should they entirely be in the coporate scene their entire career, or do they venture over into banking or PE?

How does someone bypass CFO and go to CEO with a finance background?

it’s almost entirely a crapshoot and almost certainly dependent more on your ability to form relationships than your previous positions, degrees or titles.

You ask some off the wall questions.

Pass L2 and you’ll get the job.

I consider that a compliment. I like to think I think differently than most

This is a symptom of the millenial generation.

They may think that, but we all know that it isnt a reality. They have a hive mentality where everyone agrees and persecutes those with differing opinions. I actually do have controversial perspectives that frequently illicit anger and animosity because I challenge the status quo and comfort zone of most.

^You see now, you’ve piqued my interest. Before, I was under the belief that you were just like the rest of them but now I can see much clearer what’s going on here.

Since I am now in your camp, can you provide an example of a controversial perspective that you have had which brought about animosity from the haters, and pushed someone out of their comfort zone, where the end result was an ultimate bettering of the workplace, the industry or society? And where did this occur? Work? School?

What kind of work is it you do, anyways?

i hope this doesnt dissapoint

Combination of that, along with being in the right place at the right time, and both making and missing the right career moves in your live.

Go read the bios of major CEOs and see if you can notice a clear trend across them. There probably isn’t anything definitive that you could copy. People come from different departments, different backgrounds, etc. Sometimes becoming CEO happened because the board thought at that time they needed your skills, where as the year before or two years later, they need somebody different.

Total crap shoot.

Well, for one thing, I think fundemental analysis of stocks is garbage. I do all my investing based upon intangible feel. I approach the stock market like I do sports betting.

As you probably know, in sports betting there is a betting line, that theoretically makes the game even. For instance, one football team is favored by 7 points. Many people will love to pour over statistics and player matchups and all sorts of past historical data in order to make their betting pick, but this is all pointless because this is all already encompased in the line.

Just like in stocks with their price

I make my stock picks and betting picks all on “feel” and intangibles. I visit locations and conduct business with the entities and make a decision about them.The market has already done all the work for me and made the stock price or the betting line even based on the numberical data. It’s just my job to decide who I think will play better or perform better provided the equalizing price/line.

I have only been doing this for about a year, but I have so far been 7 for 7 on my stocks.

Went long on Wynn Resorts, Chipotle, Southwest Airlines, and Halliburton

Bought Puts for Gamestop, Whole Foods, and JCPenney

Beyond that, I think alot of what people do is dumb and make comments about it. Such as this recent uproar about domestic violence against women. I just point out that it’s laughable how society tells us that women are equals and needed to be treated as such, yet when it comes to hitting women, men are outcast from society, while no one cares if two guys fight. It’s a laughable double standard. People want equality for women when it’s conveneint and not when it’s not.

I have lots of other opinions like this, but I’ll stop for now.

Yep, good points. That’s why I even started this thread. I have done a little research on their career paths, and I really cant find any similar, usable trends

from everything ive seen, the right place right time argument is probaby a much larger part then what you expect

Well, I have to say I am at a loss as to where that was going, but I definitely congratulate you on your stockpicking success.

As for your initial question, though many people on this forum seem to dismiss Nassim Taleb, if you take the time to actually read and process his book Fooled By Randomness (and please, don’t read it “over a weekend”), then I think you will have a better understanding of the role of skill and luck in the outcomes of people with highly successful lives. That book changed my entire perspective, and I am a highly skeptical person, not one prone to praising the latest “guru” in the business books section.

thanks for the input. I’m a very skeptical person as well

Repsect. Fooled by randomness is a good one. I’ve taken the approach to dismiss most ‘news’ that is posted on CNBC and the like and I feel I’m much more clear on what’s really going on. It also gives a quick talking point by ignoring the news whereever you may be where small talk is demanded, “Say, I haven’t caught a newspaper today, what are some important things going on?” This will not only open up small talk dialog in necessary settings, but also allow you to ‘outsource’ your newsreading to others.

And I suck at stock picking, so I buy cheap indexes and work in M&A.

Yeah, absolutely. In addition to the benefit of having a framework to dismiss people who are news addicts (I always had a gut feeling that the news really didn’t have much bearing but didn’t have the language to articulate it before I read it back in 2007), I have taken to viewing what people do in life, thinking in terms of “domain mapping.” I think to myself, does the outcome of what this person does depend more on luck, or more on skill? Like the favored example of the pilot, whose outcome depends more on skill, than luck.

If the person’s outcomes depend more on skill, than luck, I feel as though I respect that person even more. This is why I can’t get behind worshipping Warren Buffett or any of the tens of “superstar investors” that are out there – everyone is looking for a recipe to “replicate their approach.” You know, if it wasn’t Buffett, it would have been someone else. It isn’t that these people have no skill, it’s just that they had the right skills at the right time and seized the opportunity. There are plenty of other people out there with equal skills to Buffett, but without his name brand or huge capital amounts to play with so they can’t achieve a critical mass to get to his level. I just wish that people were more honest about the role of luck and chance in their own outcomes.

I admit this is hard to do, as we are in an industry full of egotistical blowhards…it is easy to look weak in front of these people so the expected path that people go down is similar to the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” and they play it safe on the side of taking credit for everything, with zero attributed to luck.

I don’t understand this at all. Stock picking should be fairly easy unless you have no clues about trends.

I think Taleb should write a book about the existence of Fairies and Santa Claus. Randomness in the stock market? Give me a break!

Disclaimer: never read his book. Don’t plan on reading it.

That’s not the idea of the book.