The “C” in CEO, is short for “Chief”. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines Chief to mean: Highest in rank or authority; most important; the person who is the leader of a group of people, of an organization, etc. Today we are accustomed to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and in some organizations other chiefs like the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) and the Chief Risk Officer (CRO).
Chiefs have been around since man first graced the earth. However, chiefs in business, certainly ones with the word “chief” in their job title, are quite a recent thing. A 1999 University of Michigan study written by David W. Allison and Blyden B. Potts found that in 1955 only one of the 200 largest industrial corporations in the United States used the title Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to denote its chief executive. By 1975 all but one of these firms had a CEO. A similar study from the University of Princeton written by Dirk M. Zorn found through an examination of 400 of the largest corporations, none of them had a Chief Financial Officer in 1964 but more than 80% did by the year 2000. The main catalytic event was an ambiguous change in accounting rules in 1979 issued by the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB 33) in response to the corporate funding crisis of the 1970's. As the need for financial controls became greater, companies needed to establish an authority at the top of their organizations that would be fully responsible for the compliance of control related regulations.