In the business world, the chief executive officer is the person responsible for the highest-level decision-making made at a corporate entity. Without a leader to guide them, the people in the organization might scatter in a variety of different directions and find themselves at cross-purposes instead of working productively together toward the same goals.
In our book, Thinking for Results: Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement By As Much as 30 Percent, we cite the work of neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg (2009), who applies the metaphor of a chief executive officer to the brain’s frontal lobes. For example, he notes that
The prefrontal cortex plays the central role in forming goals and objectives and then in devising plans of action required to obtain these goals. It selects the cognitive skills required to implement the plans, coordinates these skills, and applies them in correct order. (p. 23)
