Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
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Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#2I might be wrong, but I think the title should be 'The Seven Habits of Steve Ballmer'
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#3I haven't read the book that he linked to, but in the blog post or the journal article I didn't see any true exploration of causation vs. correlation.
What if these are 7 habits that make people likely to become CEOs? It would follow, then, that CEOs that failed would also exhibit these habits. I'd like to see the article provide some evidence that these are habits specific to "spectacularly unsuccessful" CEOs as opposed to CEOs at large.
Without having to provide such evidence, I would propose an 8th habit common to all spectacularly unsuccessful CEO: they all breathed air. If your CEO or senior execs breath air, it may be a warning sign.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#4Very interesting. Though aren't several of these also "habits" that Steve Jobs had?
E.g.
Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#5Seriously? How many more decades are we going to see people mistake correlation for causation as if this problem had not been thoroughly understood? This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact.
Kahneman and other psychologists have long established that we color character traits into stories that fit the result. If a CEO is pursuing his beliefs strongly and the company succeeds, we call him a visionary. If the company fails, we say 'he never listened'.
If you really wanted to check the influence of a certain character trait, you'd need to try to (carefully) compare how CEOs with the trait performed compared to CEOs without the trait, and make damn sure your sample sizes and methods are sound before making any confident assertions. What you definitely don't want to do is look at a handful of failed companies, find some common traits among their CEOs and call it 'The 7 Habits Of Spectacularly Unsuccessful CEOs'. That's intellectually negligent, and it's a testament to something that is fundamentally broken in journalism — we have publications that pretend to educate when they in fact serve misinforming entertainment.
Shame on Forbes for publishing such ill supported claims, they should have more respect for their readers.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#6I've been in companies whose CEO exhibited all of the items on the list (two in particular has a good 5 of them). They became CEO by convincing people with money to invest in their "vision" (it always starts as a vision sale).
Now both companies are under new management where the CEO only has one or two of the items on the list and are doing ok. In both cases, neither CEO could understand why they were being removed and were certain the company would totally fail without them -- as they were the most important person in the company!
Another favorite of mine: Feel they can do everyone else's job better than them. Also, You are an expert until you hire on -- then you are just another body.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#7Seriously? How many more decades are we going to see people mistake correlation for causation as if this problem had not been thoroughly understood? This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact. Kahneman and other psychologists have long established that we color character traits into stories that fit the result. If a CEO is pursuing his beliefs strongly and the company succeeds, we call him a visio…
"This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact."
Though this might be true about the article itself as posted, this is not a bit of bad journalism. The author Sydney Finkelstein, is a Professor of Management and spent 6 years studying 50 companies and conducting some 200 interviews, here's a link to the journal article : http://www.jacksonleadership.com/pdfs/7Habits_IveyBusinessJo...
So to answer your "If you really wanted to check the effect of a certain character trait, you'd need to try to (carefully) compare how CEOs with the trait performed compared to CEOs without the trait, and make damn sure your sample sizes and methods are sound before making any confident assertions." It seams like 6 years, 200 interviews, and research in 50 companies would seem to be a fairely extensive study IMHO.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#8Very interesting. Though aren't several of these also "habits" that Steve Jobs had? E.g. Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
Maybe this list should be "Seven habits of CEOs that change things".
If they are good, they use there personality traits to make things better. If they are bad, they use these traits to make things worse.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#9Seriously? How many more decades are we going to see people mistake correlation for causation as if this problem had not been thoroughly understood? This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact. Kahneman and other psychologists have long established that we color character traits into stories that fit the result. If a CEO is pursuing his beliefs strongly and the company succeeds, we call him a visio…
"This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact." Though this might be true about the article itself as posted, this is not a bit of bad journalism. The author Sydney Finkelstein, is a Professor of Management and spent 6 years studying 50 companies and conducting some 200 interviews, here's a link to the journal article : http://www.jacksonleadership.com/pdfs/7Habits_IveyBusinessJo... So to answer you…
Just because a sample consists of 50 companies and 200 interviews hardly makes that a sound sample, given no information about how those companies were selected, and given no attempt to compare those companies to successful companies. For example, 5/7 of these traits easily describe Steve Jobs.
Furthermore, just because someone is an academic authority hardly makes them less liable to fall for the cognitive biases that davidkatz mentions (that we color character traits into stories that fit the result). It goes without saying that we all have a strong bias to attribute other people's actions to their personality rather than conditions in their environment over which they have no control (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error). We generally don't apply this error to ourselves.
The classic example is that if someone trips over a rock, you'll tend to have the impression that they're clumsy. If you trip over a rock, you won't think you're clumsy, you'll just say to yourself that the rock was sticking out.
Re: Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
#10Very interesting. Though aren't several of these also "habits" that Steve Jobs had? E.g. Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
Maybe this list should be "Seven habits of CEOs that change things". If they are good, they use there personality traits to make things better. If they are bad, they use these traits to make things worse.
Or seven habits that increase risk. These habits boil down to having an extreme trust in their own infallibility, and eliminating and ignoring input that disagree with them, which may work fantastically well for a long time if you are a true visionary, but puts you at extreme risk of being blindsided if you aren't, or eventually even if you are.