Quantifying what makes a good CEO

The shrewdest baseball managers have slashed their reliance on hunches and superstitions in favor of a new recruiting model based on metrics and a statistical analysis of how games are won and lost.

Now a pair of executives at Russell Reynolds Associates, the global headhunting firm, is trying to fashion a similar change in the way executive recruiters hire chief executives for early-stage start-up companies.

Tuck Rickards, a Russell Reynolds managing director in Boston, and Patrick Delhougne, an executive director at the firm's New York headquarters, argue in ''The Scouting Report," a study published this month, that the quality and fit of a chief executive are the most critical factors in the success of venture-backed start-ups.

But within the world of recruiters and venture capitalists who fuel start-up businesses, there's almost as much mythology surrounding swashbuckling entrepreneurs and bootstrap enterprises as there is around tobacco-chewing sluggers and late-summer winning streaks.

Rickards and Delhougne try to cut through the mythology and focus on what chief executives must do in distinct phases of their start-ups to give company founders a ''due diligence process for human capital." They contend that their method increases the odds of a company's success instead of simply chasing after superstars. Another goal is reducing the need for chief executive changes at start-ups.

''Company builders can develop a more rigorous discipline for assessing the potential of individuals to perform," the Russell Reynolds duo writes in the report. They reference the practices of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, as chronicled in the 2003 book ''Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," by Michael Lewis.

With the help of senior partners from 40 venture capital firms they surveyed over the past year, Rickards and Delhougne identify three distinct phases through which early-stage chief executives must navigate:

First is building an effective business model. This requires a leader who can align a technology with a market opportunity and crystallize an idea employees and financial backers can buy into.

Second is bootstrapping the business. That means turning a business model into a business, focusing on operational efficiency, and setting priorities against a backdrop of limited money and time.

Third is scaling the organization. This means hiring managers, building a team, and focusing on expanding the footprint of a business while handing over day-to-day functions to other managers.

''It's difficult to find all these sets of skills in one person, but it's doable," Rickards said in an interview. ''The point of this methodology is to dig back into people's prior experience to look for these skills."

Experience is a key measure of value for venture backers of start-ups, who favor a more exacting process for picking chief executives today than they often tolerated during the dot-com era.

''Venture firms are more risk-averse in the companies they're backing, and more risk-averse in the executives they're picking," Rickards observed.

For Bob Higgins, founder and managing general partner at Highland Capital Partners in Lexington, finding ''someone who has successfully led an organization in the past" is a top criterion. And, ideally, the company's backers want a chief executive who is comfortable with the creative thinking needed to build a business model, as well as the operational discipline required to expand the start-up later.

''By far, our preference is not to be making changes," Higgins said. ''It's hard to change horses in midstream."

Higgins said venture investors prefer to find a chief executive among a start-up's founders when possible. When it's not, the founders must be open to bringing in an outsider. All told, Higgins thinks he and his colleagues get the chief executive decision right about 80 percent of the time.

Those are odds some baseball managers would envy.

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.