Chief Executive Officer: your questions, answered

A lot of meetings, but the good ones are specific. A typical week has a leadership team meeting where you review the operating plan against actuals, a handful of one-on-ones with your direct reports, a couple of customer or partner calls, and time preparing for the next board meeting. At a smaller company you'll also be closing big deals yourself and interviewing senior hires. At a larger one you spend more time with investors, the press and the board's committees. The part nobody schedules is the fire: a key customer threatens to leave, a lawsuit lands, a VP resigns on a Friday afternoon. Those eat the week you'd planned.

There are a few well-worn routes. The most common inside larger companies is running a business unit with its own profit and loss, then moving to COO or president, then taking the top job when the current CEO steps down. Some CFOs make the jump, especially at companies where capital and deals matter most. Founders become CEO by starting the company, which is the fastest route and the one with the highest failure rate. A smaller group comes from consulting or private equity and gets placed by investors to run a company they've bought. What almost every route shares is owning results you can't blame on anyone else before you get the title.

No. Plenty of chief executives don't have one, and boards rarely pick between two candidates on the degree alone. An MBA helps most if you came up through a narrow function like engineering or marketing and need to learn finance, and it helps with the network if you want to move into a private equity backed role. What boards check harder is whether you've run a budget, managed managers, and made a hard call that cost you something. If you have that record, the degree is optional.

The board of directors. The board hires you, sets your pay, approves the budget and big moves like acquisitions, and can fire you. At a venture backed startup the board is usually a few investors plus the founders. At a public company it includes independent directors with committees for audit, pay and governance. At a private equity owned business, the fund's partners are on the board and they'll be in your numbers every month. Learning to manage the board, sending clear updates, never surprising them, and bringing bad news early, is a skill on its own.

Firing people you like, and living with decisions made on half the information. You'll let go of a leader who helped build the company because they aren't right for the next stage. You'll cut a product your early customers love. You'll approve a layoff and then stand in front of the people who stayed. None of that gets easier with practice, but it gets faster, and slow decisions on people are the most common mistake new CEOs admit to. The other hard part is that the job never really switches off. Your phone matters on vacation.

The pay figures on this page are the place to look, and the spread is huge. A CEO of a small nonprofit and a CEO of a public company share a title and almost nothing else on the pay stub. What moves it is company size, whether the company is public or private, industry, and how much of the package is equity. At startups and private equity owned businesses, the salary is often modest and the real money is in the ownership stake, which could be worth a lot or nothing. At larger companies there's a base, an annual bonus tied to targets the board sets, and long-term stock awards.

They want proof you've run something with a profit and loss and hit the plan, or explained clearly why you missed it. They look at whether you've built a team, which means asking who you hired and where those people are now. They check financial fluency: can you read a cash flow statement cold and talk through a budget without your CFO. And they want judgment under pressure, so expect questions about a time you were wrong and what you did next. Search firms run most of these hires, and the reference checks go deep, often to people you didn't list.

They're different jobs with the same title. At a startup you're doing sales calls, writing the pitch deck, recruiting your first managers and checking the cash runway every week. You have more control and far less support. At a large company you're working through layers of leadership, spending real time with analysts and the board, and your decisions move slowly but touch a lot of people. If you like building from nothing and can handle chaos, the startup side fits. If you like scale, structure and working through others, the larger company suits you better. Many people try both before they know.