But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results.
Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.
From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general.
Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.
The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all.
As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.
It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.
And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.
Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.
As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.
They spend 18 rounds over six months vetting a developer with silly puzzles that must be solved from memory, with an audience. It's about as far from the job as possible.
This happened by trying to find capable people that didn't come to you through nepotism and paper mills and such.
The strange thing is that nobody has developed a hiring battery for the naturally hyperconfident employee you met through the grapevine, who costs you millions, and as often as not, irreparably damages the company.
>Leaders are necessary.
Sure, where would be biological lifeforms today if hadn’t been driven by some visionary leaders. Ooops? But I mean, now that humanity provide great leaders, biosphere is thriving like never before. Reooops?
And about startups. For a while the Stanford MBA + MIT CS founder duo guaranteed a pavlovian response from VC regardless their actual experience.
Maybe we should have LLMs (and ML for results) start hiring at the top level to dogfood some reality back into the class
> really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help
This world view is not falsifiable. Regardless of success you can say it was luck.
But I just don’t understand this. In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility, and often they don’t want to, or it doesn’t work out. Why would you expect that you could drop them in as CEO?
Are CEOs always the cause of success or failure? No. Are they good at avoiding blame? Yes. Are they also extremely skilled and competent people? Yes.
> In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility,
In my experience, this means one of two things:
You're asking people who already have too much to do, to add even more to their plate.
Or
You're throwing the projects which are doomed to failure and nobody else will touch at them.
In basically every job I've ever had this has been the case. There is nothing like being given a shit sandwich and being told it's delicious ice cream.
So you don’t think people have a skill ceiling in this area?
You can't drop everyone in that position but there is a significant number that still could do it. It is not 100% more like 50%/60% luck.
Does execution, management, marketing and hiring not matter? The best product or opportunity wins and it’s just whose along for the ride?
Everything matters. Luck matters as much as the other things.
What is luck and why assume an equal weighting? Is it luck whether you accomplish your household chores?
I hate this new cult of personality thing many are trying to cultivate.
But to that point most of the time, poor performance is attributed to "the market" and strong performance is attributed to "leadership". There is some clear cognitive dissonance going on.
So you don’t believe execution on these points makes a difference?
Bring it more local. Does how you manage your household or work matter? Where does scaling that up break?
Seems people have been very clear on this and you keep dragging it back to points already made.
I’m asking for clarification because if the answer is no I’m afraid we are in psychologically different worlds and people feel out of control of very basic parts of their lives.
It also depends on whether you're providing appropriate compensation for the responsibility that you're offering. I see several cases where managers offer more responsibility for a peanuts' worth of pay hike and then say the same stuff you said.
Yes. At my work place a level bump is almost a doubling of comp and the main criteria is being able to be responsible for projects.
Are there people who could do more and are happy where they are at? Sure. But that’s also not going to work for CEO.
You know which people are eager to take on more responsibilities? The people who don't believe in the concept responsibility.
I feel like we should consider the opposite as well. What if you actually hire someone who is great but they achieve zero results because of sheet bad luck and “help” from a product team that couldn’t go right.
The guy who took over JC Penney's after leaving Apple's Retail division is a good example of this. On paper great pedigree. Success --but did not understand a different, albeit retail, market so well and things tanked horribly.
Yeah, JC Penney was not Apple Stores (which by the way probably looked awful to a lot of people on paper--see Microsoft's attempt to clone). But JC Penny was a discount brand whose shoppers absolutely weren't looking for an expensive Apple Store experience.
CEOs are basically dice rollers. "Proven" are just formerly lucky gamblers. The only control that CEO has is whether they roll the dice themselves or let their underlings roll. It's entirely possible that the only CEOs that are winning against the odds are the ones that roll themselves the least.
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