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Comment by squirrelicus | Hacker News Reader

Good ideas come from all skill levels. But good idea vs bad idea ratio is fundamentally what separates those in or out of brain space. To get your ratio up, you need training and experience in making good ideas more frequently and bad ideas less frequently. And then you get placed in a space where your ideas are your core output. Those people tend to be salaried the most often. And they don't like to spend their time sifting through the bad ideas of untrained people when they could instead be generating more good ideas per unit time. I don't see the problem here

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What your casual elitism disregards is that people who actually do the work can have different ideas, especially related to the work they are doing. Put another way, since they have a different perspective than the higher-ups, they are sometimes able to find potential efficiencies and product improvements that wouldn't occur to others.

Additionally, front-line workers can see real problems with how customers experience the product that may not be reflected in the metrics used to evaluate the product, since metrics are inevitably gamed.

The ratio of good to bad ideas doesn't matter if you miss the one good idea you really needed. A company that invests in ways to effectively use the ideas of 'untrained people', as you so delicately put it, can derive a lot of value from those ideas.

I think you're right. The front-line workers often have a certain level of ground-truth about how processes actually work in practice. They may not have all the same information as the higher-ups, but they have a very unique and valuable perspective that can be used to improve strategic decisions.

IMO, this is one of the reasons why distributed command (as opposed to centralized command) models often work better, particularly in a fast moving environment.

A CEO only has to be right 51% of the time to be successful.

That really depends.

Sure, my statement is merely metaphorically true. It's meant to communicate the point that the CEO must optimize for being right enough frequently enough to be successful. Competition surely drives whatever that number is up, and good managers surely listen to the ideas from their line workers. And they must mentally triage ideas to be worth considering more deeply. The best managers credit the line workers and encourage more idea sharing. But the manager must do the triage, and the manager must ignore ideas that don't pass the bar, and the manager must empower only those that have a track record of producing good ideas and not the others.

So do you think Donald Trump has good ideas to improve things for poor people ?

Empirically, it turns out the answer is yes.

But reality is the complete opposite.

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