“I don’t wish this on anyone,” is what Carlos Ghosn once said about simultaneously taking on the chief executive roles at carmakers Renault and Nissan. Being the CEO of one company is all-consuming, so how have some business leaders done the unfathomable — willingly taking on two or more?
A new study sought to understand how multi-CEOs — defined as those who hold more than one chief executive position at once — got there in the first place and how their companies managed to win over shareholders and the public.
Researchers at TU Dortmund University and HEC Lausanne scrutinised the career trajectories and tactics deployed by “celebrity CEOs” — Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX), Jack Dorsey (Twitter and Square) and Steve Jobs (Apple and Pixar), alongside Ghosn. Their thinking is that shareholders should be attuned to potential red flags to ward against such arrangements.