The fastest way is start your own company and name yourself CEO.
I’m an astronaut then.
Hey Jeff, didn't know you were on HN!
The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
31–40 of 90 posts
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t covet the role. I just feel I’d be marginally better than others that suck at it.
There was a study about some skill, and like 80% of people thought they are better than average.
If a relatively small number suck HUGELY at a skill then 80% may be better than average. (50% will be better than median.)
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a study about some skill, and like 80% of people thought they are better than average.
If a relatively small number suck HUGELY at a skill then 80% may be better than average. (50% will be better than median.)
I'm no native English speaker but at least in my experience average is used to mean any "central tendency", and not the mean in particular.
We probably should just avoid saying "average" and use "mean", "mode", "median", or whatever we actually mean instead.
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any study of successful people (or really successful anything, according to any criteria you choose for “success”) can be dismissed as a “survivorship bias”. But it’s quite baseless to presume that no insight can be gained by studying them. What type of bias is it when you just invent an explanation for something out of thin air?
The problem is the sampling. If you select a sample of observations matching your criteria, and then do a factors analysis of them, you're effectively committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (another way of describing survivorship bias). If instead you were to randomly select from a cohort of individuals and track their career trajectories, then you'd be looking at what factors contribute most to success. I suspect…
> Among the few interesting elements in the HBS "study" is the possible role of high-risk gambles in career advancement. That also ultimately points to survivorship bias (it excludes those who took such gambles and lost), though there's the prospect of multiple-iteration games as well.
This is a fundamental problem with dismissing all accounts of success so broadly. Multiple-iteration is not a possibility, it’s a certainty.
If you take risk in your career, and you fail, the only way that failure can prevent you from trying again is if you fail so hard that you actually die. Failing to death is a tremendously uncommon occurrence when it comes to taking to taking risks in your career.
The survivorship bias argument really only works if you imagine each person has a single opportunity through their entire life to achieve success. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy isn’t exactly relevant here either, because that is about re-defining the conditions of success after you’ve taken your measurements. The idea of success here is clearly pre-defined.
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is the sampling. If you select a sample of observations matching your criteria, and then do a factors analysis of them, you're effectively committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (another way of describing survivorship bias). If instead you were to randomly select from a cohort of individuals and track their career trajectories, then you'd be looking at what factors contribute most to success. I suspect…
> Among the few interesting elements in the HBS "study" is the possible role of high-risk gambles in career advancement. That also ultimately points to survivorship bias (it excludes those who took such gambles and lost), though there's the prospect of multiple-iteration games as well. This is a fundamental problem with dismissing all accounts of success so broadly. Multiple-iteration is not a possibility, it’s a cer…
Fair points, and I was trying to indicate this myself.
More broadly though this highlights the importance of thinking through the model and looking closely at methodology. The HBS article itself really doesn't provide sufficient inforation to judge.
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#36The fastest way is start your own company and name yourself CEO.
So funny that they didn't mention that option.
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#37What about the losers? Please fill in this table first, then we can talk about the whys and hows: | # sprinters | # non-sprinters | --------+----------------+-----------------+ CEO | | | --------+----------------|-----------------| non-CEO | | | --------+----------------+-----------------+ The "CEO Genome Project" home page looks just like promotion for a book. I guess you have to buy it before judging whether it off…
exactly. this is so basic, it's staggering that the article doesn't cover it. I realise hbr isn't a peer reviewed journal, but it's pretty disgraceful that a publication that carries the name of what is claimed to be the top university in the world peddles research that, whatever merits it may have, disingenuously uses a flawed argument like that. And unfortunately this isn't even the worst of its kind in HBR...
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a relatively small number suck HUGELY at a skill then 80% may be better than average. (50% will be better than median.)
I'm no native English speaker but at least in my experience average is used to mean any "central tendency", and not the mean in particular. We probably should just avoid saying "average" and use "mean", "mode", "median", or whatever we actually mean instead.
As a native speaker average is almost exclusively used to for mean and people specify median or mode when that’s what they are talking about. The same way people say mean without specifying arithmetic, geometric, or harmonic mean then it’s the arithmetic mean.
It’s only when someone says something like the average family rather than saying the average income when things get ambiguous. Typical on the other hand is closer to mean because it’s tossing out outliers.
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a relatively small number suck HUGELY at a skill then 80% may be better than average. (50% will be better than median.)
I'm no native English speaker but at least in my experience average is used to mean any "central tendency", and not the mean in particular. We probably should just avoid saying "average" and use "mean", "mode", "median", or whatever we actually mean instead.
I have to agree. Level of suck at management is also unrelated to any one quantified linear scale so the mean is the result of a particularly arbitrary personal (or national like GPA with range bias vs 0-20 with other bias) definition of a corresponding numerical ratings so median and mode have fewer degrees of freedom for arbitrary results.
It is also pretty absurd to assume without explanation that a minority who are especially bad at management have even their minority presence in management given that if sucking matters it should correlate with some type of failure that eventually correlates to drop out.
Re: The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study (2018)
#40The “i regret becoming a manager” theme gets repeated often and I don’t know about you guys but I go to work for the money, plain and simple. Sure coding is pleasurable (I’d do it for free as a hobby anyway) but if being ceo pays many times more, I’d just go for that if possible. Seems almost unreasonable not to desire that job over a coding position..