Conversation

Gold. Once, after a horrible exec hire, my old boss and I got to talking about what we might do differently. The way he put it, and the line I remember, was: “probation is a state of mind.”

Quote Tweet

Shreyas Doshi

@shreyas

Dec 18, 2020

First-time founders, CEOs, and even employees should understand the playbook of the Incompetent Leader (IL). The IL is savvy & charismatic, and excels at 4 things: 1) Feign competence 2) Create confusion 3) Buy time 4) Fail up The IL playbook & what to do about it

Show this thread

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Aug 2

Sure, you might not be able to put an exec hire on probation the way you might with a junior IC hire. But you can mentally put them in a ‘probation’ bucket for 6 months. And then reverse the hire quickly if it doesn’t work out.

Replying to

Also in the thread is a great point about charisma which I think overlaps a lot with your ideas about ‘believability’

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Replying to

@umachingunde

Maybe the lesson is to build a charisma alarm into all our heads!

4:08 AM · Aug 2, 2022TweetDeck

Replying to

Or be someone a lot of people don’t try to be charismatic with - lower real or perceived power. I’ve sometimes been that person and it’s fascinating how I don’t get the charisma others get. It can be a superpower

Replying to

and

For this reason I was grateful we always checked in with the lunch buddy and the receptionist after interviews at Stripe

Show replies

Replying to

This might actually be a good strategy. Reminds me of a thing Ruth Reichl used to do when reviewing restaurants - dress in elaborate costumes to see how she was treated when not the nytimes critic