The “sausage factory” metaphor is true not just of small startups but also medium and, yes, even some large executive teams. Really valuable story for people stepping into executive mangaement for the first time. Our clients have found that they need to take a new approach and mindset when joining executive team — that what might have worked for them leading their functional or BU team won’t necessarily work on executive team. And oh by the way, the question “What team are you on?” is the #1 question. And then finally, we have found many CEOs don’t really run their “executive team” as a true team. More often than not, they are a “working group” (see John Katzenbach, Discipline of Teams). Sadly, many CEOs don’t really know how to get team-level perofrmance from the executives. Hence…sausage.