Quote: Jack Dorsey on “Being a CEO”

Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter and Square) offers a compelling metaphor for leadership: the CEO as a Chief Editor.

“I’ve often spoken to the editorial nature of what I think my job is, I think I’m just an editor, and I think every CEO is an editor. I think every leader in any company is an editor. Taking all of these ideas and you’re editing them down to one cohesive story…

In my case, my job is to edit the team, so we have a great team what can produce the great work and that means bringing people on and in some cases having to let people go. That means editing the support for the company, which means having money in the bank… and that means editing the vision and the communication of the company…

We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go - all these things that we could do - but we need to present one cohesive story to the world.”

Leadership as Subtraction

Dorsey’s perspective aligns with the idea that leadership is often about saying “no” rather than “yes”.

1. Editing the Team: Ensuring the right mix of talent and culture. It’s not just about headcount; it’s about the composition of the group.
2. Editing the Vision: A company can do anything, but it can’t do everything. The “editor” removes the distractions that dilute the core story.
3. Cohesion: Just as a movie editor stitches scenes into a narrative, a leader must stitch disparate departments (Engineering, Sales, Product) into a single, unified direction.