ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on interviews with 26 CEOs across a wide variety of industries reveals their concerns as well as agenda and behavior. It discusses the issues that have been placed against four intellectual frameworks to get a better picture of CEO concerns. The top general managers may emulate, substitute for, and perhaps replace the CEO; the top staffs people are there to inform, help, and facilitate CEO activities. There are 40 theoretical constructs or concepts into which one can fit the concerns that CEOs address. Four rather different frameworks will be used for explication: stages of planning, levels of strategy, roles of the general manager—CEO and arenas of economic decision making activity—politics, markets, and hierarchies. Three groups might especially change their response patterns to these CEO concerns, especially the heavy weighting of human resource management issues, but also other topics such as internationalization, government, technology, and unfriendly takeovers.
