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Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat May 28, 2005 09:48 PM
from the smart-does-not-mean-sensible dept.
from the smart-does-not-mean-sensible dept.
CHESTER COPPERPOT writes "Scott Berkun writes an interesting essay on 'Why smart people defend bad ideas'. He states a number of interesting highlights on smart people and dumb ideas. From the article: 'In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don't really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied.'."
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I Will Defend my Bad First Post (Score:5, Funny)
Michael Bolton: That is the worst idea I've ever heard.
Samir: Yes, this is horrible, this idea.
Re:I Will Defend my Bad First Post (Score:5, Insightful)
Tom: Of course it was! The guy made a million dollars!
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Re:China: Smart != Number Doodling (Score:5, Insightful)
That is because they actually use that stuff over there. We don't make physical stuff anymore, and thus don't deal with geometry etc. as much. We make junk bonds and bad movies, and you don't need trig for that.
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Re:China: Smart != Number Doodling (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine how people would feel if the Chinese tried to overthrow the totalitarian theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia, or the United States...
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Re:China: Smart != Number Doodling (Score:5, Funny)
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Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just geeks do this, of course.
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
He seems to be finally getting back on track, and I'm not sure I'd call the project a "bad idea" (if it's fun, how is it any worse of an idea than, say, buying a big mansion or other waste of money?). But it hasn't really been much of a success, as far as rocketry programs go - even SpaceDev's relatively weak hybrid engine would classify as a leap forward in comparison to what Carmack has accomplished.
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
First, I will say that I am not religious. If I had to ID myself, I'd say I'm a Protestant Christian, but the last time I went to church on a Sunday was probably 15 years ago.
But even as a Smart Person, I'm not sure how it's "fairly clear" that God does not exist. A lot of Smart People have, in fact, pretty successfully argued in favor of the existence of God.
One of my favorite arguments in favor of the existence of God is Thomas Aquinas' theory of the "prime mover". Thomas Aquinas was a "religious philosopher" who was actually banished from the Catholic church because of his efforts to prove the existence of God. In any religion, faith is paramount, so proof is neither necessary nor desired - if you need proof of God to believe in him (or her, or it), then you're sort of missing the whole point of religion in the first place. (Aquinas was later made a saint, despite his earlier banishment.)
Anyway, Aquinas posed five proofs in favor of the existence of God, some more convincing than others. The one that I recall as being most convincing, and the one that nobody has been able to refute to this day (because it is based on the laws of physics), is the theory of the prime mover.
Aquinas argued that for every movement or action, there must be a cause or impetus, something to turn potentiality into actuality. He used the example of wood, which at any time has the potential to be either hot or cold, but can only actually be one or the other at any given time (ok, feel free to bring up quantum mechanics, but the point is the Hitchhiker's Guide Improbability Drive does not really exist - things can't be everywhere and everything all the time). If a piece of wood is actually cold, it can potentially be made hot by fire, which will then make it actually hot but no longer actually cold. So anything can have two or more potential states, but only one actual state, and to change that actual state requires an external force.
He then argues that this cannot go on into infinity, for if it did, nothing could actually exist because there would be no prime mover to have set everything in motion. (He wrote this prior to our discovery of the "big bang"). Now we know that, in fact, it did not go on into infinity - there was a time when our universe did not exist, and scientists still do not completely understand how it was created. We know that there was a great buildup of energy and matter that exploded into what we now know of as our universe, but we do not know how or why that buildup occured, and likely never will because it would require peering back beyond the beginning of time.
Aquinas argued that the "prime mover" was God. There is no possible explanation for the creation of the universe that fits the laws of physics. This goes hand in hand with his third proof, that of "possibility and necessity", which states that if everything can either exist or not exist, then there must have been a time when nothing at all existed (we now know that this is, in fact, true). If nothing at all existed, it is impossible for anything to now exist, because nothing can cause its own existence. Therefore, he argued, only God could have caused our existence, ultimately.
So I don't think this is a case of smart people arguing in favor of bad ideas. It's one thing to be skeptical, but there are as many good theories in favor of God's existence as there are against, and nobody's ever going to have a "smoking gun" either way. (Aquinas was also not arguing in favor of a smiling, benevolent, grey-bearded God with a human-like personality - he was arguing in favor of some power beyond our understanding that displayed intelligence and was able to manipulate matter and energy as it saw fit from beyond the confines of our universe and our natural laws.)
In fact, I think your post is more an example of why it pays for smart people to be open-minded rather than simply skeptical all the time.
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event. The Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe or the beginning of time. It is simply where our current theories come to a halt. The Big Bang theory was developed by tracing the trend of the expanding universe backwards through time. If one assumes that there were no changes in this trend, then we arrive at time in the finite past where every thing in the universe was at a single point. This point had infinite density and temperature.
Our current physical theories aren't capable of coping with infinite densities and temperatures. They produce a divide-by-zero error, a singularity. The Big Bang isn't the beginning of the universe, but rather the end of our theories.
There is one theory that the Big Bang was caused by our universe colliding with our universe. There was never a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature. Instead, our two universes crumpled and only intersected at certain locations. At those intersections, the vacuum energies of the two universes combined, producing areas of very high, but not infinite, density and temperature.
The theory also states that this collision might not have been the first one. Or the last one.
Whether or not this theory is true doesn't matter. It is enough to know that it shows that time isn't neccessarily finite. If time stretches back infinitely into the past, there is no need for a first event.
Likewise, time might be finite but boundless, looped in on itself. The last effect becomes the first cause.
Lastly, if every event requires a cause, and God caused the first event, what caused God?
I don't think any assumption can be proven by reason alone, but only with evidence. We can't disprove the existence of God, but we haven't been able to prove His existence either. It is most difficult to prove a negative. But that's where Occam's Razor comes in. All things being equal, God is not the simplest explanation for the world we see around us. According to Occam's Razor, we should not assume that God exists, at least until more evidence comes in.
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event.
Actually, the idea of a "prime mover" is an older philosophic idea, the oldest recorded discussion being from Aristotle. Aristotle actually argues that time must be infinite in both directions, but this doesn't hamper the existence of a prime mover. In order to understand the prime mover, you have to understand Aristotle's ideas about "cause" [wikipedia.org].
The prime mover is the formal cause of everything, but not the efficient cause of anything. In modern times, we've forgotten such distinctions and only talk about efficient causes.
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
>nothing could actually exist because there would be no prime
>mover to have set everything in motion.
No, you got it wrong. It cannot NOT go on into infinity. Going on forever quite easily solves the problem, because there's always something to act & cause the reaction.
If the Universe is
All of Aquinas's proofs boil down to that (well, that I remember, at least): he creates a situation that sounds logically impossible to resolve rationally, and thus creates the need to resort to an Actor who doesn't have to play by any rules. Problem solved. The Universe is allowed to exist again.
(oh, and another problem that no one ever seems to address: let's assume, for now, that his arguments are in fact logically sound. Irrefutably so. He never offers any argument to convince us that what he calls "God" is, in fact, anything at all like what we traditionally consider Him. The only requirement is that it doesn't obverve certain laws of physics or other rules of the Universe that we know. It could be a giant unicorn. Or an Infinite Improbability Drive. Or a peculiar, unknown class of matter, like dark matter, with properties that don't follow the laws of physics as we understand them.)
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps he just refuses to believe in something for which there is no evidence beyond the smug assertions of people like you?
-jcr
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Re:Why Do Smart People Defend Bad Ideas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I hate it when people get so damned attached to their ideas that they consider the questioning of their ideas to be a personal attack on them. I love it when people argue with me and attack my ideas. And when I'm wrong, I'll learn from it... but I'll still defend my ideas fiercely and attack yours because I don't like integrating an idea into my thinking until I've proven to myself that I can't tear it down.
Why do stupid people think the idea is more important than the debate?
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Jukebox guy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jukebox guy (Score:5, Insightful)
He's currently working for Apple pulling in a quarter million a year, while I sit here in Engineering school.
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Re:Jukebox guy (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, six-figure salaries aren't really uncommon for senior programmers / engineers with a couple decades of experience.
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Re:Jukebox guy (Score:5, Insightful)
And.. I want to say *ANY 'employee' making over a few mill a year, but really it is just MOST people being paid such is being paid as a form of recognition, not because the person being paid cares about the money itself.
And a CEO with vision can be worth infinitely more than 500 programmers -- because a company without a PURPOSE goes bankrupt and there are no more programmers (div by zero
That said, writing a contract that lets a CEO commit murder and still get paid is pretty damned stupid.
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This extends to the rest of life (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This extends to the rest of life (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I feel less guilty about my slackerism now, thanks! : )
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Backwards! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This extends to the rest of life (Score:5, Insightful)
In my younger years, I took this to mean "Do everything, because you can". Now that I'm in college, that entire lesson was bunk, and now I'm stuck with a bunch of what I'd consider useless knowledge.
The "Pretender" gene, as I often call it (after the TV series) is something a lot of us are blessed/cursed with. We have the ability to sit down at a computer and code anything, then get up, walk into a garage or workshop, pick up a hammer and build something, then go to a rally and speak about how you can change the world if your party will support you.
The problem with it is futility. Others like me, myself included, find it futile at times to do anything, since we've done everything we're interested in doing. Us general-purpose, disposable task people have to cast ourselves into single purpose, repetitive task people, and that's really hard for us, in college, and in life.
Sadly, I don't see an easy solution. Except I won't be telling my children that "They can do anything". I'll tell them "you can do something. but it's up to you to choose what that something is."
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Never pass up on a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
[...] something a lot of us are blessed/cursed with [...]
The problem with it is futility [...]
Sadly, I don't see an easy solution.
In art, it's known as the "white page syndrome".
You have a clean, white canvas, on it your talents enable you to paint anything. So you sit there, awash in the mental miasma of the endless possibilities assailing you.
The way I deal with it is to stop thinking and draw a random line, then based on what this restricts the possibilities to, I can build around it.
And the use I found for my "useless" knowledge is to wait for the conditions under which it will become usefull.
Maybe you'll be at a job interview and you'll have knowledge of something the interviewer is passionate about: Bang, you have the edge, you get chosen over the other equally qualified applicants.
My knowledge of all-around trivia actually became usefull when I was employed in a company that did some localisation work, it wasn't what I did there, but whenever the translators were faced with a subject they were unfamiliar with, they came to me. The kids in highschool were hostile to me for being a know-it-all, but at that job it made me quite popular.
Off course, I still feel this... lassitude, sometimes. I haven't found an easy solution, but since in a hundred years' time we'll all be dead, we might as well be ourselves while we can : )
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Re:This extends to the rest of life (Score:4, Insightful)
The quote was "You can have anything you want--but you can't have everything you want."
Substitute "do" for "have" and booya!
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Re:This extends to the rest of life (Score:4, Insightful)
I chose something because it's what I spent most of my time doing, even if I don't really enjoy it.
Implicit understanding of my philosophies kind of drove your post off into a misunderstanding of what I'm getting at. Not all kids, myself included, know exactly what to do. My high school graduates less than a hundred students a year. Fourty of them leap off into state schools and different colleges. Twenty jump into vocations and tech schools. The other ten of us, the few that never really excelled at any one thing, the few that were completely and totally average in every subject (or in the case of my friends, completely and totally ABOVE average in every single subject) had no clue what to do. So we scatter off into collleges and universities, spending who knows how much on even more education towards even more indecision.
I don't consider myself superior, nor do I find myself below everyone else. I'm just your standard, middle class American with student loans and misunderstandings. Ever seen American Beauty??
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Re:This extends to the rest of life (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't have enough clear criteria to evaluate a situation to your satisfaction, don't waste time evaluating it by ambiguous criteria. If the situation looks very much 50-50, then either choice is as right as right can be.
'Either bale might be wrong' paralizes - 'either bale must be right' frees.
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The article sans references in case of /.'ing (Score:4, Informative)
By Scott Berkun, April 2005
We all know someone that's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I've catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I'm a recovering smart person myself and I've defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you'll get more than just entertainment value (Look, Scott is stupider than we thought!) out of what I have to say on this topic.
Success at defending bad ideas
The monty python argument sketchI'm not proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. Majoring in logic is not the kind of thing that makes people want to talk to you at parties, or read your essays. But one thing I did learn after years of studying advanced logic theory is that proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you're arguing with aren't as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren't as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent's friends) they've probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it's based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say Well, at least I was right.)
Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. You don't really think that do you? or Well if you knew the rule/law/corollary you wouldn't say such things), they're never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessive-ness about being right is strong enough, they'll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).
Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate, remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.
For example, just because you can't prove that I'm not the king of France reincarnated doesn't make it so. So when someone tells you "My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail" know that there is a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn't necessarily make it the best plan. It's possible than plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to scrutinize the plan. As we'll discuss later, diffusing bad thinking requires someone (probab
No they don't. (Score:5, Funny)
Like that time everyone wanted to give a multi-billion dollar corporation hundreds of millions of dollars to make another season of a mediocre TV show. That was a great idea, wasn't it?
Oh, and then there was the tens of thousands of dallars they gave to that guy who ran a copyright-material-file-trading-site. That turned out smashingly well.
And-- umm--- hrm.
{pause}
well... (Score:4, Insightful)
some people invest a lot of time into ideas and when they see their ideas threatened, they throw up the defense like no other. it transends programming all the way up to world politics.
i am guilty of it, but i have gotten better at admiting my mistakes and using it as something to build upon. it takes a lot to realize when you are at fault and you fucked up.
References (Score:4, Informative)
- Difficult conversations, a book about confronting people in tough situations.
- The argument clinic, Monty Python (If you've never seen it, watch it before reading this script. It's in the 3rd season, disc 9 of the boxed set). Also see the splunge scene in episode 6.
- Games people play, Eric Byrne. A book on transactional analyis: a model for why people behave as they do in certain situations.
- The informed argument, Robert Miller. Textbook style coverage of both proper and unfair argument tactics.
- With good reason, Morris Engel. a short summary of common logic manipulations, explained with a sense of humor (over a dozen cartoons).
- Why smart people can be so stupid, Salon.com
Best. Citation. Ever.
Because we CAN! (Score:4, Funny)
Why are people who defend stupid ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because they did well in school. But school (at least in the US) wasn't designed to teach people to think, but to teach them to memorize facts and follow directions.
Re:Why are people who defend stupid ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone has a large set of preconceived notions that form the basis for our understanding of the world. In general, some of these notions will be correct, others incorrect, and some of them will be contradictory. Smart people have these, too, but when confronted with a contradiction are more likely/able to go back and examine all of the assumptions to find out which ones are false, or less widely applicable than previously believed. Even smarter people will do this proactivly -- looking for assumptions they hold that may be untenable.
The real question (to be fair, also the question the author attempted to answer) is not why smart people defend stupid ideas, but how do we (smart or no) recognize when we are defending stupid ideas and fix it.
Unfortunately, what the author really addressed is people who don't recognize that they have weaknesses. Those people usually aren't smart. Those are probably people who, as you said, did well in all of their subjects in school.
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The big reason why open source fails the user (Score:5, Insightful)
The big reason why the user fails open source (Score:5, Insightful)
I write apps for techies and I write apps for non-techies. The UIs and requirements are very different. Apps written for techies and accepted by techies is not proprly judged by non-techies, and vica versa. The arrogance is found in the people in both camps who insist that UI should fit their camp when it was written for the other camp.
If I write an app for techies and they like it, there is nothing "wrong" with it. Often, "techie" interfaces are aimed at functionality, not "point click drool". Thus any remarks about it being ugly are simply irrelevant.
The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.
And if they aren't the "target market" of the code author(s) that is just fine. Quite frankly much of the apps I write are not intended for end-user non-technical people and I don't care if they don't like it. Nor should I. Making it pretty will NOT enhance my market in the slightest, it will only pollute it. The same goes for end-user non-technical apps I write.
And finally, there is the "you get what you pay for" comment. Most open soruce apps are done for free. As such, Joe EndUser has no right to be "included" in the process.
Now to tie it all up with the favorite computer analogy: cars. GM (for example) sells cars. They sell cars for the enduser, and cars for the techie. Most people are familiar with the first category. But they also sell race-only versions of some of their cars, such as the C5R or upcoming C6R. The general public has zero input into these models, as it should be. Other companies also make race cars. These are oriented around a specific purpose.
The Mosler for example is a race-oriented car. Sure you can drive it on the street (and end user could buy and drive one), but it is aimed at being a performance auto for the track. It is the "code written by geeks for geeks" side.
Then you have the minivans and sedans, for example. They are built for the general consumer (the end user w/o technical skills). Sure a racer can drive one, even adapt it for racing (tens of thousands of Americans do this every year), but as a racer their input is not part of the design process or feature list. Witness the near-universal elimination of options like radio-delete and ac-delete.
IMO, nearly all these rants about ugly yet functional interfaces versus pretty but reduced functionality but pretty shiney interface fall under the categories above. Everybody wants a hand-built Ferrari for the price of a 10 year old wrecked and stripped Geo Metro. And they blame the "industry" for them not getting it.
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That has nothing to do with intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
I've known smart people like that.
And fantastically dumb people like that.
I've had someone argue that the queen of England isn't rich, and get this, when I explained that she's the biggest land owner in the U.K. and she made about 27 million a year last time I checked, he argued that she isn't rich because when she dies someone else will inherit her money (unlike Bill Gates, who'll bring it with him to the afterlife?).
Smart people just defend their insanity with more flair.
I do this deliberately (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, the vast majority of people either disagree without justification, or (even more worryingly) agree without justification -- which just demonstrates how unwilling most sheep^Wpeople are to engage in thought and/or debate.
Re:I do this deliberately (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you may be confusing agreement with people who decide that you're a complete idiot (rather than a condescending nuisance), nod politely and look for an escape route. Certainly, whenever someone starts yammering to me about "sheep" (or worse, "sheeple"!), I "agree without justification" and flee as soon as an opportunity permits...
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Smart People Defend Bad Ideas... (Score:5, Interesting)
So smart-schmart. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
Paul Graham (Score:4, Informative)
One Idea to Nail Them All (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Death of the psyche? (Score:5, Interesting)
But the usual response is the "sour grapes" one instead. These geniuses feel the world doesn't like them and regard them highly enough. They hate the world for that. They begin to respond accordingly with a haughty sneering disregard for others' accomplishments and abilities outside of their fold. Non-geeks are "lusers" and worse.
Admit they are wrong? Fark no. That would be embracing the death of their artificial self they've made of ego straw. They can't face and embrace true emptiness that comes with the finality of true understanding and acceptance. They can't because of fear. Non-geeks may be right that they deserve derision and scorn. Non-geeks may be right that technical smarts aren't as good as hot social skills. Non-geeks may be right and they may be... wrong. And if the geek is wrong, then he isn't smart. And if he isn't at least smart, then he has nothing else and consequently would be... nothing.
I went through gifted classes with kids who exemplified this thinking. Everything was about showing off their smarts. Making a calculator out of flashlight bulbs and switches. Creating new number and word games every single day. Designing new things and creating new programs and writing new reports every day. At all times, they had to be smarter. Any mistakes were not ignored as you ignore the dog barking outside while watching the football game. They were ignored in the style of a child covering their eyes with their hands and plugging their ears with their thumbs at night in the dark in fright desperately trying to ignore the things that go bump in the night.
Because if they were wrong, then they weren't as smart as all that, and if they weren't smart, then they had nothing and were nothing. This would be the same as accepting total psychic death. If you are nothing, then how can you be?
This is the mindset of most of the Linux world today. If they are wrong, then Microsoft by default is right and there is no other outcome. They cannot be wrong but learn and grow. They can't see that Windows is easier to install, configure, use, and support than any Unix variant for the average person and try to make Linux as easy. They can't backtrack and admit mistakes and leave it to others to fix their sloppy work on the theory that at least it is free. On this score, Microsoft is smart and sexy because they will after a while admit, say "we screwed up", and shrug and move on. The geek brigades besieging the MS world on the field outside never do.
Well as someone who went through gifted classes and was maxing out the scores on all the IQ tests they could throw at me in grade school, I can confidently say to them, you can be and in fact are more often than not wrong. And the courage and intelligence to admit this and learn from it is far greater an intellectual exercise than making X11 behave with a new video driver while using Vi on a Chinese keyboard when your first language is French.
I would further say to these people, let your fear go. You're wrong all the time starting with that you're wrong that being wrong means you're nothing. You are not secretly dumb because your intelligence is less than omniscience or because real world things trip you up as opposed to computer world things. And when you get older, you will get slower and you will seem less brilliant. If you insist on believing that your smarts are all you have, then when they are gone you truly will have nothing.
Stop the worrying. Save time. Embrace the death of yourself. Begin recompiling self version 2.0.
Paul Graham (Score:5, Interesting)
Rather Interesting...
http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html [paulgraham.com]
Dangerously offtopic, and here goes my karma (Score:4, Insightful)
Because their parents, and/or religious leaders, tell them to.
*puts on asbestos suit*
I think I have an answer to that. (Score:5, Interesting)
If they cannot define the criteria (other than "turn the company around") how will they be able to find a person who can successfully implement those criteria?
Instead, they go with "rock star" CEO's.
Here's a quick example. Get 100 pennies. Toss them in the air. Take out the "bad" pennies that came up tails. You should have about 50 left.
Do it again. You should have about 25 "performing" pennies.
Again, now you have weeded out the dead wood and you're left with a dozen or "successful" pennies.
Again, now you have the half dozen or so "highly successful" pennies.
Once more and you have the few "rock star" pennies. These are the pennies you pay millions of dollars to turn your company around. These are the pennies that don't make mistakes. These are the pennies that understand management and the market.
And hiring CEO's is even worse than that. At least with the pennies, they only had a couple of factors influencing them. Companies have all kinds of influences from overseas competition to economic depression to lawsuits and so forth.
If a CEO makes a decision, and the company increases in value, how do you know that it was anything other than mere luck?
Maybe his decision was extremely stupid and a thousand other decisions would have increased the company's value even more.
Which is why one of the first actions of the new CEO is usually to secure the golden parachutes for himself and other execs.
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Re:Case in Point (Score:4, Funny)
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