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Comment by xelxebar | Hacker News Reader

What about the losers? Please fill in this table first, then we can talk about the whys and hows:

            |   # sprinters  | # non-sprinters |
    --------+----------------+-----------------+
        CEO |                |                 |
    --------+----------------|-----------------|
    non-CEO |                |                 |
    --------+----------------+-----------------+

The "CEO Genome Project" home page looks just like promotion for a book. I guess you have to buy it before judging whether it offers any value.

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>What about the losers?

Pretty much the entire genre of "How To Succeed In Business" is nothing but an illustration of survivorship bias. The common attributes that get identified are almost always either also shared by those who didn't succeed or if not were likely irrelevant to the success.

exactly. this is so basic, it's staggering that the article doesn't cover it. I realise hbr isn't a peer reviewed journal, but it's pretty disgraceful that a publication that carries the name of what is claimed to be the top university in the world peddles research that, whatever merits it may have, disingenuously uses a flawed argument like that. And unfortunately this isn't even the worst of its kind in HBR...

I don’t think it is surprising that HBR publishes this kind of article. On the contrary this is exactly why we can trace most of the organizational problems and a lot of societal ones to the ideology factory called Harvard Business School.

You don’t need to study non-ceos if you are trying to understand what a ceo is.

That’s not true. If you only look at CEOs you won’t be able to tell which behaviors are unique to CEOs and which are not. If you don’t eliminate these potentially universal traits and behaviors you’re setting yourself up to be be wrong due to biased data. More generally: how can you possibly understand what something is without understanding also what it is not?

It doesn’t matter. You’re trying to solve the problem of what makes a CEO. Because no one is a born a CEO.

The idea that you need to study 2B people to get at that is absolutely nonsense.

Okay. I only look at CEOs and find that tha vast majority have 2 arms. Can we therefore conclude that having 2 arms is key to making someone a CEO?

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