[Survey] Is Hiring a CEO Just Random Chance?

On Tuesday, there was an interesting article in DealBook about how picking a CEO tends to be a bit of a crapshoot and is often based on the personal biases of the board. The article focused on new CEOs Marissa Mayer of Yahoo and James Rogers of Duke Energy, and the fact that – according to the Harvard Business Review – nearly 40% of CEOs fail in their first 18 months.

We don’t think this is the case for CEOs in private equity, so we decided to do the only thing that makes sense: ask. Below is a quick survey about how CEOs are hired and incentivized in private companies and we invite you to contribute your thoughts.

Portfolio Company CEO Survey

We’ll follow up next week with the results.