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There's been lots of CEO news this past week. The Wall Street Journal carried the following stories.

CEO Firings On the Rise As Downturn Gains Steam
Yahoo Names Bartz as CEO
Apple's Jobs Takes Medical Leave

From these stories we learn that six CEOs of publicly traded companies were fired within eight days. Several more were said to be on the brink. Don't weep too much for them. They're all walking away with plenty of cash to start a new life. Investors expect that new CEOs will mean brighter days.

Yahoo picked on of the most competent CEOs in Silicon Valley history to replace Jerry Yang, who will quit playing CEO at Yahoo. But he'll be down the hall indulging himself in his founder role. Yahoo stockholders wonder if Carol Bartz can work her magic in the purple kingdom.

And, just a week after he assured analysts that his health was fine, Steve Jobs announced that he was taking a medical leave of absence. He says that he'll be back in June, but since he's purposefully avoided candor so far, Apple stockholders are wondering if they should wait and see if Magic Steve will return.

All of this begs the question of how much difference CEOs actually make. Good leadership can make a difference. That's the basic finding from a bevy of research studies. There's debate about how much and in what circumstances, but leadership matters.

One study of the automotive business measured the effects of leadership over forty years at every auto company except Toyota. They found that the leadership effect was significant.

But the more interesting question is "Why didn't they study Toyota?" Here's the answer from Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer.

"It had a system that made performance robust and largely independent of who occupied senior leadership positions."

In other words Toyota didn't spend time worrying about finding the next star CEO. Instead, the company spent its energies developing a system that didn't require a superstar CEO to succeed. Works for me.