Love this quote from Gregory Northcraft: "The difference between experience and expertise is that with expertise, you have a predictive model that works." Sort of adds a new layer to 'you can either have five years of experience, or one year of experience five times.'
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There are lots of non obvious implications from this single quote.
For instance: want to hire a good generalist for your startup? The best indicator: they have a history of finding ‘predictive models that work’ in all their previous domains. You can test for this.
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When you say “that person might not be the smartest person in the room, but boy are they effective” what you’re essentially saying is that they have a history of systematically looking for predictive models that work. This quality is orthogonal to intelligence.
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When you’re hiring a good individual contributor, you might not require them to have a legible explanation of their predictive model.
But if you’re hiring a manager, they damn well better be able to explain their approach, because that’s table stakes for being a good teacher.
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(Good managers must be able to teach, because training is the prerequisite for delegation. managementforstartups.com/articles/how-t)