3 ms·

I'm sick of "but Elon Musk does X." Yes, the guy's exceptional. That literally means not representative, outside the normal rule or distribution. So like a blac

by mLuby 5y ago

I'm sick of "but Elon Musk does X." Yes, the guy's exceptional. That literally means not representative, outside the normal rule or distribution. So like a black swan, you can point to him and say "proof X is possible" but you can't point to him and say "proof X is normal"—you've got to wait for "half of Fortune 500 CEOs do X." (Nothing personal colordrops, I've just seen this take a lot lately.)

Jetrel 5y ago
I mean, it's a fair take to argue that CEO-ship ought to be meritocratic, in the sense of only hiring extremely exceptional individuals. If you're just an average jobsworth doing a merely 'decent' job, you shouldn't be the ceo of any company. It's kind of similar to airline pilots or surgeons, where we have to demand "excellence" as a lowest-common-denominator. At that level, they need to be graded on a reverse curve, where unlike regular grades, where a mere 65% score is a passing grade — for those folks, nothing less than a 95% should be a passing grade. It's easy to make the argument for airline pilots and surgeons, because the human tragedy that results from their potential incompetence is immediate and obvious. I feel like the tragedy that comes out of incompetent CEOs is a lot more insidious, and sneaky. Poorly run companies, and depressing "waste of life" has ruined a lot of people's lives. In fact, one could dare to surmise that it's actually, statistically speaking, directly killed a lot of people (an easy low-hanging fruit here would be safety stuff that OSHA doesn't cover), but there's a lot of mental health stuff we don't track as well. This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of Florence Nightengale — her primary contribution to medical statistics was to take something that people brushed off as irrelevant or not-causal, and prove that it was a primary malefactor. She convinced the british top brass that the bulk of their deaths during war had nothing to do with enemy action, or even hospital deaths from injury, but literally was just caused by petty diseases, due to poor barracks sanitation amongst uninjured men.
- Talanes 5y ago
  Competence at being a CEO, competence in the core business (whether engineering or otherwise,) and competence at splitting focus between completely different levels of the business are all different competences. Being skilled at all three is the exception, but that doesn't make the non-exceptions incompetent. If you always aim for the exception, what you actually end up doing is selecting for the third competence; someone who can code-switch. And if that person isn't exceptional, then you just have a CEO who is getting involved things outside their depth.
mirekrusin 5y ago
Shouldn't it also make you sick to read about prescription for exceptional hypergrowth from 500 to 5500 employees? It's not like everybody here will experience this kind of rapid growth. We also don't know how much of it is survivorship bias. What if there are cases where this approach contributed to failure, ie. because people were shifted from where their expertise actually was?
mekkkkkk 5y ago
> "proof X is possible" Isn't that exactly what the parent comment said?
- mLuby 5y ago
  In context it reads as parent disagreeing with grandparent's statement that a "leader [who] cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work… signals a lack of maturity" by saying "[Musk shows] it's not true in every case." So my quibble is simply that "proof leaders do X" doesn't disprove "doing X is bad leadership," despite parent's implication to the contrary.

by mLuby 5y ago

Jetrel 5y ago

I mean, it's a fair take to argue that CEO-ship ought to be meritocratic, in the sense of only hiring extremely exceptional individuals. If you're just an average jobsworth doing a merely 'decent' job, you shouldn't be the ceo of any company. It's kind of similar to airline pilots or surgeons, where we have to demand "excellence" as a lowest-common-denominator. At that level, they need to be graded on a reverse curve, where unlike regular grades, where a mere 65% score is a passing grade — for those folks, nothing less than a 95% should be a passing grade. It's easy to make the argument for airline pilots and surgeons, because the human tragedy that results from their potential incompetence is immediate and obvious. I feel like the tragedy that comes out of incompetent CEOs is a lot more insidious, and sneaky. Poorly run companies, and depressing "waste of life" has ruined a lot of people's lives. In fact, one could dare to surmise that it's actually, statistically speaking, directly killed a lot of people (an easy low-hanging fruit here would be safety stuff that OSHA doesn't cover), but there's a lot of mental health stuff we don't track as well. This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of Florence Nightengale — her primary contribution to medical statistics was to take something that people brushed off as irrelevant or not-causal, and prove that it was a primary malefactor. She convinced the british top brass that the bulk of their deaths during war had nothing to do with enemy action, or even hospital deaths from injury, but literally was just caused by petty diseases, due to poor barracks sanitation amongst uninjured men.

Talanes 5y ago
Competence at being a CEO, competence in the core business (whether engineering or otherwise,) and competence at splitting focus between completely different levels of the business are all different competences. Being skilled at all three is the exception, but that doesn't make the non-exceptions incompetent. If you always aim for the exception, what you actually end up doing is selecting for the third competence; someone who can code-switch. And if that person isn't exceptional, then you just have a CEO who is getting involved things outside their depth.

mirekrusin 5y ago

Shouldn't it also make you sick to read about prescription for exceptional hypergrowth from 500 to 5500 employees? It's not like everybody here will experience this kind of rapid growth. We also don't know how much of it is survivorship bias. What if there are cases where this approach contributed to failure, ie. because people were shifted from where their expertise actually was?

mekkkkkk 5y ago

> "proof X is possible" Isn't that exactly what the parent comment said?

mLuby 5y ago
In context it reads as parent disagreeing with grandparent's statement that a "leader [who] cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work… signals a lack of maturity" by saying "[Musk shows] it's not true in every case." So my quibble is simply that "proof leaders do X" doesn't disprove "doing X is bad leadership," despite parent's implication to the contrary.