alt Hacker NewsCEOs manage to fail upwards their entire career, I don't suspect this will be any different. Just some "nerds on a forum" who got annoyed with his personal decisions.
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100% this. The CEO at my last company squandered hundreds of millions of investor funds, and now he's the CEO at another company taking on hundreds of millions in debt.
Another example: current CEO of Cerebras, is an SEC felon from a prior company (for cooking the books), and now he's CEO of a public company.
I am sure this poignantly describes some CEOs, but my guess is this is probably empirically false on average.
(I'd ask some LLM to research it but the people who would be doubtful it's false significantly overlap with the people who distrust LLMs, so I'll just leave this as a random guess and nothing more.)
I think this is broadly true of leaders including lesser ones. It even seems true of roles like product manager.
The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc. Whether blame falls on poor execution, poor planning, or overpromsing, those are precisely the things that chosen leaders are supposed to have been chosen to avoid—and what they would in theory fail downwards for. Unpredictable things do happen, but the regularity of these outcomes for projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't enough capable ones (period), and/or that we shouldn't be org'd to need them in the first place. The last one is simply saying that if the environment is unpredictable enough that you can't plan well, then let's not spend time and money on planning. That in itself axes large chunks of the things product leaders do before work starts.
It makes iterating a more likely plan, but most teams and workstreams don't iterate too much. The iterating that sometimes is done is typically downstream of the plan, strategy, architecture that leadership leadershipped. They might do better without all the planning and overpromised timelines, which gut iterating. Iteration is only sort of a strategy anyhow (depends on what layer we're talking about when we say strategy). Iteration is what hedges a lack of vision.