2min chapter

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish cover image

#147 Reid Hoffman: Better Decisions, Fewer Mistakes

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

CHAPTER

Are There Common Mistakes That CEOs Make When Recruiting?

The most common mistake is where do you get the cadence of hiring and adjusting? People tend to naturally want to promote from within versus hire. "There's many, many more smart people in diversity experience outside your organization"

00:00
Speaker 2
Was there a difference between how the companies performed and how CEOs sort of reacted to that initial sort of news about COVID and the world changing? And what I'm thinking here is the people that were quick to adopt, my hypotheses would be that they performed better and their companies performed better over the next sort of like 18 months, whereas people who were slower to adjust to a changing reality or even denying that reality, that would also be a heuristic that it probably didn't perform well. But I'm curious, you have way more aperture into this than I do.
Speaker 1
Because like part of what you're measuring is how well is someone assessing what the possibilities are. And so for example, in the early, you know, pandemic was, you know, people were like, Oh, this will be a month and it'll be gone. You're like, well, maybe, but by the way, what if it's not? Like, because part of what you have to do is think about like, what are the possibilities and probabilities and then navigate to both surviving and thriving in a broad range of those? Now, you can't do for everything. So for example, you say, well, maybe nuclear war is going to start next week. Well, okay. If that's going to happen, then you know, that's not part of our, you know, it's legitimately not anywhere near our scenario planning. And so you go, okay, what's the, what's the set of things you need to be doing? And you know, part of it is also like, where do people look at, you know, kind of like also like one level of crisis is, okay, how will help affect customers, how will affect the revenue, how will affect ongoing operations. By the way, this is one of the things that board members who are on, you know, multiple boards can be helpful on in ways that are spreading of knowledge is, you know, you say, well, in addition to all that, in operations, we also have a, like this is mammothly stressful and disruptive to employees. You know, there's questions around, okay, how are they navigating childcare, you know, a bunch of employees usually have families, you know, what is the question of a, like kind of resetting to that? And then how do you, how do you help do that? So for example, some companies started looking for what are the resources they could go higher and deploy to help their employees. And then it's like, oh, okay, great, let's make sure that those resources are in various ways identified and shared across different companies as a way of doing that, as a way of thinking about it, as a way of making it work. Right. And so you get that kind of level of additional depth, because, you know, you're initially going to think about like, does the business survive? And that obviously affects jobs and all the rest. But then you start thinking about like, well, boy, we now have a, you know, a mental health question that's been amplified for all our employees. So what do we do? Well, maybe we should go, you know, engage Lira health as a way of helping with those kinds of issues too.

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
App store bannerPlay store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode