How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them
One CEO says when hiring he asks if the applicant thinks she is smart or hard working. The only correct answer is hard working. Later in the article another CEO at a college job fair looks at a plain resume and asks what the kid has been doing with his time. The kid says he drives home and works Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at his family's diner all weekend returning to school on Monday morning.I used to work on a massive private yacht. I'm cleaning and polishing the outside making it look pretty for all the passerby's to admire after we arrived at the marina at Atlantis in the Bahamas. A tourist perhaps in his early 40s with a family stops me to ask "How do I achieve getting my own yacht?" I said what everyone says, hard work. He scoffed at me and replied that he works very hard in technology in Vegas. He works 50+ hours a week and that he will never realize a yacht like this.It's not hard work. That's not the answer. It's something else. After working 6 years on private yachts my best guess is that the people who own the yachts hire people who know what they are doing, they provide those people with the resources they need, and they stay out of their way. They do not micromanage.The writer mentions Ray Dalio and his hundreds of principles for working at his firm, Bridgewater Associates. Maybe, but the big thing to take away from Dalio's principles is not to micromanage. He has built an algorithm to make decisions based on merit of each employee's history of making the correct decision. [0] "In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right." He has established a way to quantify merit, which I think is similar the democratization of the stock market itself.[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...