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richardhutnik on 15 October 2011
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Kasz216 said:
richardhutnik said:

CEOs get lucky to a certain degree, based upon a decent number of factors they have little to no control over.  They also have a board they do have to answer to, and unless you have a cult of personality around you, the way Jobs did, you end up playing politics and the decisions the company makes comes out of the collective decision making of the board.  This decent number of factors they have little to no control over will cause a CEO to be seen as a darling one time, then a few years later, end up being seen as a goat.  Carly F of HP went from hero to goat in a few years, because decisions she made happened to not pan out, although they seemed to be smart at the time.

On the later point, in an information based economy everything scales to a very large degree.  The internet makes it so either it is feast or famine.

None of that sounds like luck.

You seem to have a strange phenomena of considering everything a person doesn't have direct control over as luck.

You might as well claim that 100% of being a stockbroker is luck because a stockbroker has no direct control of a company and often doesn't know how research and other things are happening behind closed doors.

Being wrong doesn't mean your lucky.

Hell seems like according to your definiton some things people do have direct control of, is directly within a ceo's control.  Like whether or not you have a cult of personality.

Which steve jobs developed by being an uncompromising dick who nobody liked behind close doors but stood behind things having to be his way.

 

Incorrect foresight, inability to garner board support and inability to read the future of your company and the economy are NOT luck.

It is a lot easier in life to make bad choices and do worse, than it is to make good choices and succeed.  In this, there is also survivor bias, where an individual CEO, who happened to be around in a boom time, gets worshipped as some sort of genius, when it is they got lucky.  The reality is that they just got lucky, and survived events.  In short, incompetence can get punished, while competency has no guaranty of getting rewarded.  By the law of large numbers, competency should eventually pany out, but that would depend on the size of the window.

In the case of being wrong, if you are wrong and it works out, you got lucky.  But, it also has been noted, you don't measure the quality of a decision by the outcome, due to a large bit of probability involved in complex decisions.  Competent poker players will testify to this, as would anyone else taking risks who decides to remain true to employing a strategy.

In this also, you see in professional sports where a coach who does the same thing, and had been successful, will end up getting fired.  The same went with the General Manager in the likes of baseball.  Theo Epstein is now GM of the Cubs, because of the meltdown the Red Sox had.  Did Theo suddenly become less competent than before?  Did he do any worse than when the Red Sox Nation thing broke out?  Same guy, doubt any sign of any difference, just things didn't break right.