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When I was a teenager, I wrote to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, telling him how he's had such a huge impact on me, and how he's very inspiring to me. He responded that I buy one of his two books.
I worked for a startup that was acquired by Salesforce. Pretty soon after it was all official, they sent over 200 signed copies of his book. This is especially notable because they weren't signed by him - just by random other SFDC employees. It was a nice gesture, I guess.
> the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1]. Grant…
The golfing ones are a bit more extroverted and charismatic than the non-golfers; they "look like CEOs". They are more likely than the non-golfing ones to have attended a top-tier MBA program. Their average height is significantly greater than the non-golfers. And so on; you see where I'm going.
Certainly there are plenty of introverted, socially challenged golfers out there. But within any population whether CEOs or lawyers or cops or musicians or whatever else, the subset of people who golf is going to be, on average, more extroverted than the subset of people who don't.
I think this somewhat ties in to Taleb's argument that you should trust surgeons who don't look like surgeons, since their achievement of professional success despite their tendency to create a negative first impression is a robust heuristic of professional competence[0].
The population of non-golfers, averaged out as a population, were held to subtly higher standards that required better performance out of them. This means that non-golfers, as a population, tend to be more challenged at work over the course of their careers, and that it was less likely that individuals could "fail up" -- the Peter Principle extends further for extroverts.
Anyway that's my theory.
0: https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg...
> CONSIDER INVESTING IN RESPONSIVE COMPANIES No. As he notes, the sample size is ridiculously small. It's simply too likely that he got lucky with 1 or 2 companies in his "respond" group. e.g., if he wrote these letters in the the early 90s and Buffet responded, he's immediately skewed his returns up because Buffet outperformed the market SO much in the 90s. That's likely luck, not replicable skill. Otherwise, intere…
> From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies.
If anything, I would have expected the opposite. "Successful companies are more busy, and have less time to write letters to strangers. Failing companies love to spend all their time justifying themselves." Glad to see that hypothesis disproven.
If the above correlation does hold across larger sample sizes, I wonder if hedge funds will start using it to identify profitable trades. Send anonymous letters to the executives of public companies, and weight your investments in favor of those who reply. At some point, the executives will wise up and start replying to everyone. But you could make a nice pile of money before that happens.
Years ago I wrote a letter to Paul Raines, then the CEO of Gamestop. Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container. Days after I se…
this is an incredible story and has personally made an impact on me i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure enviro…
> the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1]. Grant…
Here's my anecdotal-experience-driven theory of what's going on with the golfing-CEO companies underperforming the non-golfing-CEO ones: it isn't a matter of lost productive hours while golfing instead of working. It's that the golfing CEOs are, as a population, different from the non-golfing ones. The golfing ones are a bit more extroverted and charismatic than the non-golfers; they "look like CEOs". They are more l…
Haha, just kidding. It's actually the opposite. The reason CEOs respond is because they get much fewer emails from customers than you'd imagine. They get their typical solicitations, internal meeting emails, external business discussions, but the customer emails can be interesting and more insightful than any internal letter could be. If you put time into it and write your letter which doesn't require a huge time investment to response (i.e. avoid dozens of specific questions and allow the discussions to be open-ended), you might get a response. If any human is contacted by another of our species, it's intrinsic to want to respond. Being a CEO doesn't remove that desire. Yes, you might be bothering them a bit if they sacrifice family time, but that's their own problem/choice!
> the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1]. Grant…
Here's my anecdotal-experience-driven theory of what's going on with the golfing-CEO companies underperforming the non-golfing-CEO ones: it isn't a matter of lost productive hours while golfing instead of working. It's that the golfing CEOs are, as a population, different from the non-golfing ones. The golfing ones are a bit more extroverted and charismatic than the non-golfers; they "look like CEOs". They are more l…
This part is pretty amazing. > From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. If anything, I would have expected the opposite. "Successful companies are more busy, and have less time to write letters to strangers. Failing companies love to spend all their time justifying themselves." Glad to see that hypothesis disproven.…
You want a sysadmin that’s playing video games all day, because everything is in great shape. Not a constantly stressed , jaded, angry admin. I know nothing of being a CEO, but if the CEO is bored, the company is probably in great shape.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is an incredible story and has personally made an impact on me i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure enviro…
How do you make the ( without a shift key?