Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)
I think there's decent advice here for CERTAIN TYPES OF BUSINESSES.  But this is not universal good advice for all businesses.<p>The business in question, in this story, is a grocery store.  It's a business with lots of competition and little innovation, where you're selling exclusively to customers who live very close to you.  Furthermore, the fictional business owner isn't interested in taking the risks needed to build a massive chain, he's looking to grow slowly and make small, steady profits.  For this business, there's no need for brilliance or big risks, you just need hard workers who are going to execute decently day in, day out.<p>A tech startup (the interest of most people on HN) is pretty much the complete opposite situation.  You need brilliant programmers to build an excellent product.  If you're B2C, you need those excellent salespeople who are going to dream big and go after massive deals.  If you're B2B, you need great growth hackers/biz dev/marketers who can creatively get your product in front of massive numbers of people for minimal cost.  When you're trying to grow from nothing to ginormous in 3-5 years, you simply can't do it with the slow grinding approach, the only way is with risk and brilliance.  That doesn't mean there won't be grinding, repetitive tasks along the way, there will be TONNES, and you need people who will execute on them (not the pure "idea guys" with zero ability to execute, who I agree are of little use), but you also need to be dreaming big and taking big risks.  Always going after small wins just doesn't work for tech startups, you need to regularly go after the big wins.