Reply #16

People like facts, but make assumptions.

We had an acting CEO when our CEO was on leave. The acting CEO was a short-term guy. He had some authority--firing those on the list we approved, when he saw fit, and recommending replacemens. He was good for routine expenditures, per the budget. He had to make a lot of proposals. But that's about all he could do. Everything else was run through a 3-person executive committee. They regularly met weekly and whenever there was something else important they had to be available to meet within 24 hours.

There was somebody sort of in charge of really routine stuff. There was a 3-person committee of directors in charge of everything else.

Then there was the CEO, who was on leave. It worked for 17 months. Actually, it worked a lot better for those 17 months than it had for the previous 17 months.

Any high-level documents that only the CEO could have signed were either left to the acting CEO, if they weren't that high level; or kicked "upstairs" to the chairman of the board. But that's because the CEO's leave wasn't quite amicable.