Gentleman also indicated that his peers on similar trajectories were even less successful at exec hiring. So there's a point of anecdata for you: "Good" at exec hiring might just be a 33% success rate. YMMV.
> Things go wrong, because building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard. If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/what%e2%80%99s-the-most-di...
1/ You really cannot grade absolute values on a curve. As others have pointed out, your A players are only in comparison to others in your team. Maybe they are actually C players, who knows? Maybe they are A players only in the environment you created etc, etc..
2/ And a more important point is that a lot of work is being done by people that are not A players. Whom I would call net positive is only in relationship to what I can measure. I know of many people in my team who were not exceptional at software, but got things done due to building relationship with other teams, ability to see things to completion etc. I think Amazon fell into the trap that only type A personalities get things done and I see it in other places too. It is easy to see the extremes, but a lot of times the glue that holds things together is almost invisible.
It is hard to gauge value and I personally am refusing to judge anyone (to the extent possible).
The exec's success or failure isn't an indictment of their abilities, just that they're (in)effective in this organization at this particular moment in time. It's on the founders / CEO to recognize this, manage expectations, continuously communicate, and ultimately to force a transition if necessary. Luckily, most execs know the score. This is also why exec's have such generous exit packages: both parties can admit they made a mistake & separate amicably.
It is grading on the curve. An A player at one company might be a B player at another. If someone is an excellent CxO they are probably a good candidate for a bigger and better company or the CEO job somewhere else and so will leave after some time unless given large incentive to stay or otherwise have reached their career ambitions.
However, for CxOs the dynamic is as the grandparent post mentioned, that mediocre CEOs add trivial value and the weak CEOs are actively harmful; so the expected tolerance to B-players should be quite different.
If I hire someone to be a JS grunt, I’ll know very quickly if they can make a CRUD form because their job is to produce tangible assets which are immediately usable. In all but the most extreme cases, it takes months to years to tell whether a C-level hire is making good decisions, policies, hires, etc. and repairing the damage can be a substantial amount of work in its own right.
one of the better scenarios is to have a candid, open conversation about their offramp and give them a couple quarters to find a good spot somewhere else and then they "resign".