31–40 of 164 posts
I am thinking about starting MBA in the fall (having MS in CS from a Top 10 US school), just because I can and it could be helpful for running my own companies. Talk me out of it please! (I might do a PhD in ML in parallel if I feel crazy enough)
I am thinking about starting MBA in the fall (having MS in CS from a Top 10 US school), just because I can and it could be helpful for running my own companies. Talk me out of it please! (I might do a PhD in ML in parallel if I feel crazy enough)
I'm not sure this proves anything at all. To play devil's advocate: what if top CEO's (whether by school or by track record) look for harder challenges? Someone once said Dara Khosrowshahi took the CEO job of Uber not to make money, but because anyone willing to take that job is somehow who wants to play the CEO game on "hard mode". If everyone's taking a job where there's a 50% chance of failure for their personal s…
There are two competing hypotheses: first, CEOs' CVs and track records impact their future success, but a market mechanism ensures they get promoted into jobs in just such a way that their impact is offset by the difficulty of the job. Second, CEOs skills are not measurable and their prior success does not predict their future success.
Occam's razor sort of suggests that the latter hypothesis is preferable.
I am thinking about starting MBA in the fall (having MS in CS from a Top 10 US school), just because I can and it could be helpful for running my own companies. Talk me out of it please! (I might do a PhD in ML in parallel if I feel crazy enough)
How would the MBA help in "starting & running a company"? I think the PhD may provide a better launchpad to starting something up. You may want to correlate startup founders to MBA degrees at the time of founding if you need hard data.
To draw a parallel, I work with many software engineers both with and without CS degrees, and there seems to be no correlation (or even a slight negative correlation) between performance and those with a degree. That does not mean CS degrees are worthless! It means once you have already selected for folks with a successful career in software, the degree has less predictive capability.
I'm not sure this proves anything at all. To play devil's advocate: what if top CEO's (whether by school or by track record) look for harder challenges? Someone once said Dara Khosrowshahi took the CEO job of Uber not to make money, but because anyone willing to take that job is somehow who wants to play the CEO game on "hard mode". If everyone's taking a job where there's a 50% chance of failure for their personal s…
Sounds like an unnecessarily complicated explanation for the observation the authors made. There are two competing hypotheses: first, CEOs' CVs and track records impact their future success, but a market mechanism ensures they get promoted into jobs in just such a way that their impact is offset by the difficulty of the job. Second, CEOs skills are not measurable and their prior success does not predict their future…
This is great work. It's a real job gathering and analysing all that CEO performance data. My guess is that most people were suspecting this anyway. The fact is the CEO is there for a few years making a few key decisions, a large company is like an oil tanker, and markets are quite hard to predict. Taleb has cooked a fair bit of soup on the fooled by randomness idea, but in this case his observations are correct. It…
To play devil's advocate: The primary function of a manager is to say "No". As one goes higher and higher up the hierarchy, one has to say "No" to pushier and pushier subordinates, and the cost of every misplaced "Yes" is higher and higher. While leaders just under the CEO may understand the firm situation just fine, they may also be unable to say "No" to enough bad ideas for a myriad reasons, including lack of polit…
Also, the higher you go the more vague those people get, frequently saying neither nor yes.
One of the best things to come out of so-called “big data” is the slow destruction of the human ego. I read an interesting joke few months back (not sure where, might have been in Capital Minded), the gist of it was basically: If 99% of people who buy corporations for a living can't beat a monkey throwing darts over time...why do we believe people who run corporations for a living are any smarter? They're both lookin…
The market acts as a filter which means that people still need to create and run create the enterprises for it to be able to value them.
Anecdotally, having spoken with both CEOs of very big name billion+ dollar companies and with many money managers, professional investors, and various other finance hucksters, I can say with assurance that the high end CEOs have considerably greater cognitive ability on average. People like Warren Buffett represent a kind of best of both though, since he is a successful CEO as well as investor. I think it comes down competition. Managing someone else's money for a 1-2% vigorish isn't really an activity that takes much investing skill to be successful at, especially since nobody else knows how to predict dynamic chaotic systems either.
Also, given how many new businesses fail, there is probably some survivor bias here too on CEO performance.
I'm not sure this proves anything at all. To play devil's advocate: what if top CEO's (whether by school or by track record) look for harder challenges? Someone once said Dara Khosrowshahi took the CEO job of Uber not to make money, but because anyone willing to take that job is somehow who wants to play the CEO game on "hard mode". If everyone's taking a job where there's a 50% chance of failure for their personal s…
>Over the past year, we set out to answer these questions. We created a database of approximately 8,500 CEOs and their characteristics, each individually mapped to their respective companies for the duration of their tenure, and pulled company fundamentals from Compustat, stock returns from the University of Chicago's Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), CEO tenure and education from BoardEx, and long-form…
On the other hand, at other times, academic researchers can conjure up an armada of buzz words and hot air balloons to support a position that even very limited real-world experience and common sense proves laughable misguided.