[dqdo]

I would say that the main job of any CEO or top executive is to continuously learn and self improve. As a CEO, your job is to think strategically and with a long-term vision. Most of the daily problems should be delegated to the functional managers as you will be buried in work if you try to do everything yourself. Only in situations when the rest of the company cannot figure out themselves or when there is a lot at stake should the CEO intervene. I believe that a sign of a good leader is someone who is able to delegate work to others and trusts that they can get it done.

Given how fast we are moving in the world in terms of technology and business, there are new break throughs and developments everyday that can change the landscape of entire industries. As a CEO, your main role is to understand this landscape and have a vision for the next 2 to 5 years in the case of technology companies. For older and less turbulent industries this could be 5 to 10 years.

Keep in mind that what I am saying applies to companies with +100 employees. For early stage start-ups, the CEO will have to wear multiple hats and have to take a hands-on role otherwise the company will not have enough revenues to survive. Once you have pass the threshold of survival (~100 employees), you need to reorganize your company for growth. This is a difficult transition for most start-up CEOs and the dirty little secret that VCs keep from founders is that few founder CEOs make it through this transition.

One of the best way to ensure growth in your organization is to learn about the ever changing world outside of it so that you can help the rest of the organization continuously grow and thrive. One way of doing this is to look beyond your own industry and explore how other industries are dealing with their problems. Different industries are more advanced in different area so use this to your advantage. You can "steal" the best ideas and use them to improve internal operations. Remember that at this stage in your company, you are not really building anything new. Instead you job (which is just as difficult) is to improve on whatever already exists.

One reason why you should use your spare time to learn is that some companies actually march towards a wall because they are too busy pursuing immediate profits. This is the argument behind Clayten Christensen's book the Innovator's Dilemma. It is a great book and I would highly recommend it to all CEOs whether in start-ups or in large organizations.