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Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

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Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#251

Post by pcrh »

pcrh wrote: post #244
valarauca1 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most ideas aren't that brilliant. If it occurred to you, it likely occurred to somebody else. Ideas are a product of your environment. While we pretend to be unique a lot of what we do is pretty common to dozens, if not hundreds, or thousands of people. Even ideas as earth shaking and complex as Infinitesimal Calculus and Quantum Mechanics were developed in parallel initial by people with little to no communication b…

That's the point, isn't it? Truly good ideas are rare.

(a-priori: for some reason I can't reply directly to you)

It's not quite a "no true Scotsman" since great ideas do happen and happen fairly often, in the grand scheme of things (there are over 100 Nobel prize nominees every year). The oft-repeated argument about ideas versus execution is that ideas are a dime a dozen, which is true, but most of them are not really all that great or original. The same can be said for any resource.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#253

Post by methodin »

vacri wrote: post #194
cf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sell me this pen.

That doesn't tell me how the applicant will manage a department or implement new techniques. It's a test for line sales staff, not departmental managers.

"Find a person who can sell me both this pen and a pen that does not yet exist"

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#254

Post by saalweachter »

cf wrote: post #183
vacri wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of things people should have been doing in 1924, but weren't. I mean, if we're judging by modern standards, allowing women and minorities into senior roles would be one of them. How, exactly, do you do a work-sample test for a chief sales executive anyway? "Hey, can you run our global sales division for a couple of hours, then we can evaluate if your methods really bring in the sales"? Edit: to clarify…

Sell me this pen.

Just out of curiosity, not being a salesman, is a great salesman actually expected to be able to sell anything to anyone?

Bragging aside, I would assume this is one of those cases where a huge portion of the job is differentiating likely and unlikely sales targets, and applying effort accordingly.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#255

Post by leoc »

jib wrote: post #225
leoc wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truly rare, difficult and world-changing is the realization (production, enactment, what have you) of a really great idea, and the luck of that realization occurring in the right context. Nonetheless that doesn't make the idea itself worth little (let alone nothing). By analogy, land is normally little use unless you put a building or infrastructure on it or start farming or mining it. And it's seriously expens…

Land is sort of a good example (there is scarcity involved, which makes it not a perfect analogy). Land doesn't have any intrinsic value. There are two reasons (unused) land has value: 1) Someone expects to be able to use it to create value 2) Someone expects that someone else will want to use it to create value in the future and they expect that scarcity will come into play allowing them to charge more for it in the…

To a first approximation, the good ideas are precisely those which can be used to create a lot of value: they're the land in Shanghai. It's not clear to me in what sense of 'intrinsic value' such land or ideas would lack it while (say) a pile of high-quality bricks would not. Conversely, if ideas are worthless only in the sense that building materials or pig-iron are worthless then in any ordinary sense they are not worthless at all.

Obviously ideas are less reliably scarce than land, because a number of people can have the same idea independently, and also because once another person hears your idea they can steal your fire without paying you, so it's difficult to trade an idea in a way that doesn't remove your ability to capture the value from it. But a high-quality and unobvious idea tends to occur to only a few people at any time, and the awkwardness of trying to do deals with them is far from rendering them valueless either. It's certainly not the case that good ideas are plentiful in the sense that if there one specific good idea to solve your problem but you don't think of or hear of it, then don't worry, there are lots of similarly good and suitable ideas lying around and one is almost certain to come to your attention soon.

A different, and notable distinction between land and ideas is that people are usually better at recognising valuable land than good ideas, as Frank Aiken observed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken . This is one reason why some ability to "finish" (in terms of external circumstances as well as internal factors like temperament and character) is such a valuable accompaniment to having a good idea: it helps to have something relatively tangible (be it only a prototype) to force down others' throats.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#256

Post by mcdougle »

iamwil wrote: post #129
d23 wrote: post #19

What if you aren't a finisher? How can you become one?

Depends on why you don't finish things. Often times, it's probably a mental attitude that's a road block. If you quit when things get hard, maybe you need to realize that hard things are hard. Anything worth finishing will require you to bleed. If you quit because you have to "feel like it" to work, you should work even when you don't feel like it. Hard things are hard, and nothing would ever get done if people did i…

To add to that, this is how I get through the times when I don't "feel like it": I tell myself I'll just sit down and get something done. It doesn't have to be a lot, but I have to sit down and accomplish something. Even just chipping away at small pieces of a task can add up over time!

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#257

Post by leoc »

a-priori wrote: post #249
pcrh wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point, isn't it? Truly good ideas are rare.

We're treading dangerously close to "no true Scotsman" territory here.

Only in that some intrinsically good ideas are fairly obvious. Others are not.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#258

Post by leoc »

dhimes wrote: post #215
jib wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people want to be "the idea guy", because it's cool and relatively easy. The problem is that ideas are cheap. The value of any given idea is really low - I would argue that for many organisations ideas even have a negative value on average, because you are going to spend a lot of time dealing with the idea without it actually becoming something that generate value in the end. Even if you have an idea, that w…

The value of any given idea is really low I would agree if you mean average idea. Really great ideas are rare, difficult, and can change the world. The people who come up with those are rather special. And, unfortunately, rare, and almost never (in my somewhat limited experience) think of themselves as 'idea guys.' But this hivemind (nicely crurated by VCs- think that through) that ideas are worthless is very wrong.…

> as, indeed, it is hard to separate them when you get down to it

Indeed. For one thing, probably nearly anyone who has successfully had good ideas is a "finisher" to some extent (though to very varying extents). Isaac Newton certainly thought hard and persevered in his researches, but as soon as you're bringing him in as an example of a "finisher" as opposed to an "ideas man" you've pretty badly undermined any distinction you were building between the two.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#259

Post by yxhuvud »

vacri wrote: post #194
cf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sell me this pen.

That doesn't tell me how the applicant will manage a department or implement new techniques. It's a test for line sales staff, not departmental managers.

It is a test that is not good enough to hire the applicant, but it is enough to fail the applicant.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#260

Post by jqm »

The modern business world is full of people like the author.

People who are asleep. People who are not actually alive. People who are threatened by those who think.

These people hate the thinker, but their dreary little lives rest directly on the foundation that the thinkers provide. For example, the radical who first looked at fire and thought, "hey, maybe I could use that".... now THAT GUY was a visionary who puts Musk to shame.

Really this type of people are just machines. And they will be the ones machines are easily able to replace.

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