The CEO is the Decision Machine.

Barry Corey, the President of Biola University, told me this week that he believes there are five things that a nonprofit CEO must do:

• Governance. You must work both with and on the board, developing it, because in most nonprofits the governing body holds ultimate authority over the organization. Barry was clear that he needed to care for that body.
• Vision and team. You set the direction the organization is going, and build the team that will get it there. At Biola, Barry refreshes that vision every three years.
• Ambassador. You speak for the institution, inside and out. As he put it, you might have a Chief Communications Officer at your organization, but you are the chief communicator.
• Resource development. You assemble the resources required to advance the vision. Biola is currently running a $250M campaign.
• Your own health. You have to defend your own development, and the margin that makes it possible. His board, he says, needs a healthy leader. 

(You can listen to my conversation with Barry here.)

Multiple other CEOs have told me they are the person who must “keep the culture.” Others have told me that they are the only person who must “pay attention to the whole.” And I've shared before about how the CEO is the bridge between board and staff, between governance and the work.

Yes, the CEO must do these things. These responsibilities are particular to the CEO role.

But another part of the job is more important, more consequential, more existential.

Myal Greene, the President and CEO of World Relief, put it this way in Episode 14:

A good CEO makes a handful of consequential decisions a year, and that's really kind of defines where everything comes to bear.

They define your year. If you get one of these decisions wrong this year, you may be looking for another job.

A handful of decisions will define your tenure.

When I was in high school, I read this quote that is sometimes attributed to Napoleon, though no one really knows who said it: "Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide."

The CEO is the decision machine.

(I'm loathe to use machine or computer language applied to humans. It's flimsy, inadequate, and lands lower than I mean it. But there is a mechanistic dynamic at play here, if you diagram the life of the organization.)

That's my attempt to articulate how I understand the essence of the CEO role. The phrasing is my own, but my thinking is in good company.

Chester Barnard, a telephone company president who wrote The Functions of the Executive in 1938, wrote:

The making of decisions, as everyone knows from personal experience, is a burdensome task.

Nine years later, Herbert Simon made it the organizing claim of a whole discipline in Administrative Behavior:

Decision-making is the heart of administration, and the vocabulary of administrative theory must be derived from the logic and psychology of human choice.

Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978, substantially for that line of work. (He also won the Turing Award for computing, the only person to ever win both.)

And Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, drew the boundary around the role in The Effective Executive in 1967:

Executives do many things in addition to making decisions, but only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

He also wrote that "Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on what is important."

Drucker gave much of his later career to the third sector. He consulted for the Red Cross, wrote Managing the Nonprofit Organization, and once said that Frances Hesselbein, CEO of the Girl Scouts, was the greatest leader he had ever met.

But it’s not like "CEO as decision machine" is some antiquated idea.

Here is Jeff Bezos speaking to The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. in 2018:

As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day...If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that's enough. And they should just be as high a quality as I can make them. Warren Buffett says he's good if he makes three good decisions a year.

So if management experts and Nobel prize winners and titans of industry agree that the CEO is a decision machine, why don't we talk more about how we decide things?

I have had significant conversations with 416 CEOs. (I just recounted.)

CEOs are constantly thinking and talking about vision and culture and funding and personnel and boards. 

Almost nobody is talking about how to decide.

What decision is on your plate right now, and how will you make it?

Adam Jeske, The Nonprofit CEO Advisor

P.S. Next week, I'll share which decisions CEOs tell me are the most vexing. Your thinking may be in it.

Your reply will help my thinking, research, and writing of Peerless: Nonprofit CEOs and the Decisions They Carry Alone. One line is plenty, and it helps me help other CEOs across the sector.