"received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University at Buffalo School of Management in 1983 and his MBA from Binghamton University in 1985."
"January 31, 2019, Swan transitioned from his role as CFO and interim CEO"
A CEO who has only a non-technical education (such as an MBA) is VERY unusual for hardware or software companies that are successful. Often the CEO of this kind of company has at least some technical education, and usually the CEO has lots of it. After all, most of the decisions in such firms will have a technology component to them.
A few examples:
* Lisa Su (CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)): BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and is a fellow of IEEE
* Jensen Huang (CEO and founder of NVIDIA): BS in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University
* C.C. Wei (CEO of TSMC): Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University
* Simon Segars (CEO ARM): Bachelor of Engineering degree in electronic engineering at U of Sussex, Master of Science degree from the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester
* Sundar Pichai (Alphabet/Google CEO): Has an MBA, but also has an M.S. from Stanford University in materials science and engineering
* Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO): BS in Engineering, M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network, and PhD degree in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems
* Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO): Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton
* Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook CEO): In Harvard studied Psychology and Computer Science (did not earn a degree, but did study it for a few years and implemented the first version of Facebook).
* Tim Cook (Apple CEO): MBA from Duke University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Auburn University.
* Satya Narayana Nadella (Microsoft CEO): Bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka; M.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
* Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO): Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics (Bowdoin College), MS Computer Science (Stanford University)
I'm sure there are more examples, but I think that amply demonstrates my point.
The only other example I found of a no-tech CEO leading a tech company was Safra Catz (Oracle CEO), who has a bachelor of arts and a J.D. (Law School). My search wasn't exhaustive, but it was illuminating.
Now let's compare this to Bob Swan (Intel CEO), who received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University at Buffalo School of Management in 1983 and his MBA from Binghamton University in 1985. No tech at all. Maybe Mr. Swan can do well anyway, but his lack of technical education is extremely unusual when compared to most other tech companies.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the two least inspired, lowest quality CEOs on this list (Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook) are exactly the two who have MBAs.
While CEO, Pinchai's and Cook's companies increased in value by 2.7x and 8.6x respectively, so they must be doing a very high quality job at what they were selected for.
Yes but many people would say (and that's my opinion as well) that they achieved that by resting on what was already working and minor/logical improvement of prviously mapped steps, and that that would be caught like a deer in headlight by the need to perform a massive change to adapt.
They're extremly good (better than most) at keeping the machine well oiled and maintained to ensure it performs as best as possible, but when the machine won't be able to do the job anymore they will have a hard time foreseeing it or finding the new solution.
