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Because CEO recruiting is insanely irrational. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691120393/searching-for-a-corporate-savior https://press.princet

• dwaltrip 6y ago
  Hmmm. This may sound a bit crazy but I wonder if some sort of "moneyball"-type strategy would work for CEO development and recruitment... I'm not sure who would be the general manager, how to replicate the functions of high school ball and the minor leagues, or how you could acquire the necessary data / stats... but I feel like there is some potential here!
  • _dps 6y ago
    An acquaintance of mine was working on an accounting PhD on basically this subject (trying to quantify CEO contribution to revenues and profits, all else held equal). He said that after years studying it, he thought it's too noisy with too little data over too long a timeframe to do a good quantitative analysis. He also pointed out there is a big "apples to oranges" problem even with the limited data available. In sports (but not business) you have lots of reliably tracked micro metrics in addition to final metrics (wins/revenue). The micro metrics are generated regularly (stats for each player for each game) and those metrics are portable across players (everyone is going for points, runs, blocks, whatever). In comparison, for CEOs you mainly have quarterly reporting of coarse financials (but nothing like employee morale, number of offices opened, etc.).
    • dwaltrip 5y ago
      Oh wow, very interesting. That all makes sense. The lack of consistent, comparable data is a huge issue. The complexity space that CEOs operate in is many orders of magnitude larger than in sports, and it also far more dynamic and chaotic. It seems pretty intractable.