Do CEOs Matter More Today Than In Decades Past?

Do CEOs matter more today than in decades past?  A new paper by Timothy Quigley and Donald Hambrick suggests that they do.  According to this HBR blog post by Walter Frick, "The new paper confirms a pattern discovered by previous research: the CEO effect seems to be increasing over time. In other words, the CEO of a company is a more significant predictor of that company’s performance than at any time since the question has been measured, starting in the mid-twentieth century."  The scholars argue that perhaps the big strategic choices made by CEOs matter more as industries, and the economy as a whole, have become much more dynamic.   However, the paper cannot identify the main cause of this enhanced CEO effect, nor can it rule out any particular explanations.  It simply has documented this substantial increase in CEO impact. 

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