Sometimes I just need to shut up in order to avoid telling my host that I think he is the stupidest person I’ve been around lately.
“Clay” was talking to a group of new entrepreneurs; going on at length about how brilliant he is at hiring talent for his company.
He said that knew when he should interview someone just by hearing a few basic facts, like education and general experience; no need for detailed specifics.
When he finally stopped bragging and patting himself on the back just one guy had the temerity to disagree, saying that wasn’t enough information to make such company success-critical decisions.
Clay turned and asked me to do four thumbnail sketches of candidates I knew and he would prove it was enough.
Here are the four profiles I provided.
BSBA, some programming in college; started in customer service and worked his way up through the executive ranks.
Some college; 12 years of programming and management experience.
Harvard MBA w/ 25 years progressively more responsible positions in consulting, sales and management.
MIT BS; more than 40 years programming experience in a broad array of technologies. Strong entrepreneurial bent; excellent manager.
Clay laughed and said he wasn’t surprised I included mostly “oldies,” since I was one of them.
He went on to say that he would pass on 1,3 and 4, because they probably wouldn’t fit into the fast pace of a startup. The second was a possibility, although he didn’t sound particularly aggressive.
Poor Clay, his investors won’t be pleased; he just passed on
When I was in college, I remember discussing a newspaper story with my aunts. I remember saying that I didn’t believe something and my aunts saying that if something wasn’t true it would not be in the paper.
They really believed that, because in the world they grew up and lived in it was mostly true.
Fast forward to today and you find the same attitude being applied to the information supplied by the tech they use.
They don’t question the stuff supplied by various apps, especially if it’s from known vendors.
Maxmind identifies IP addresses, matches them to a map and sells that data to advertisers.
Trouble is, accuracy isn’t their strong point.
Back in 2002, when it started in this business, Fusion reports, MaxMind made a decision. If its tech couldn’t tell where, exactly, in the US, an IP address was located, it would instead return a default set of coordinates very near the geographic center of the country — coordinates that happen to coincide with Taylor’s front yard.
Taylor is the unfortunate owner of a farm that sits on one of those catch-all co-ordinates.
And although the info isn’t supposed to be used to identify specific addresses, surprise, surprise, that’s exactly how people do use it, law enforcement included.
The farm’s 82-year-old owner, Joyce Taylor, and her tenants have been subject to FBI visits, IRS collectors, ambulances, threats, and the release of private information online, she told Fusion.
As bad as that is, at least the Taylor’s still have their home, unlike the two families who are homeless because a contractor assumed Google maps was correct, so he didn’t check the demolition addresses.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable that they accepted the tech without checking.
Unbelievable that they first called it a minor mistake.
Unbelievable that the owners aren’t suing.
Last month, United personnel once again stuck their foot in it when they first refused to provide hot food to an autistic teen, although they finally relented.
The girl was fine, but the idiot pilot called for an emergency landing, called the paramedics and the cops.
When the officers started to leave, the captain stepped out of the cockpit and said something to them, Beegle said. They then asked her family to leave, she said.
“He said, ‘The captain has asked us to ask you to step off the plane.'” Beegle said. “I said, ‘She didn’t do anything’ … But the captain said he’s not comfortable flying on to Portland with [Juliette] on the plane.”
All of this with the full support of management.
United said its “crew made the best decision for the safety and comfort of all of our customers and elected to divert to Salt Lake City after the situation became disruptive.”
Passengers who witnessed the whole thing and posted videos said it was total bunk.
Of course, what UAL did to this child was far worse than breaking a guitar, but it goes to show their motto is still “the customer is always wrong, no matter what.”
You know that old saying, ‘do not run mouth unless brain is engaged’?
These days there should be a rule about not posting to social media unless brain is engaged.
Better yet, some kind of hardware similar to the gadget that prevents a car from starting if the driver can’t pass a breathalyzer test.
Media is full of stories about people who were fired for what they tweeted.
The rationalization I hear from various people is that it won’t happen to them because “I’m different.” They say that “they (those fired) were nobodies, i.e., low-level workers or unemployed, while they are “professionals,” i.e., they have clout.
Once I stop laughing I remind them of all those with clout who sent stupid tweet that cost them their jobs.
I now believe the SMIAs have achieved Darwin Award status.
For the innocents among you, Darwins are given posthumously to people for removing themselves from the gene pool, i.e., their death is the result of their own overwhelming stupidity, such as the couple that went past a barrier set up to keep people off the cliff edge at Cabo de Roca and slipped while trying to take a selfie—and did it in front of their kids.
Here are other recent entrants.
Last week a man in Mexico was taking a selfie when he accidentally shot himself in the head. Others have sustained injuries while taking selfies: A man was trampled by a bull in France while trying to take a photo in front of it, and a reporter was nearly hit in the head by a stray baseball while snapping a photo of herself.
Culture and societal norms change.
Starting in the Elizabethan era people longed to be a “nine days’ wonder.”
Since the Sixties people hoped for “15 minutes of fame.”
These days they are willing to die for 15 seconds of social media fame.
A slicked-up entrepreneur is inevitably a salesman trying to compensate for an inferior product. Based on this perception, Mr Thiel’s venture fund instituted a blanket rule to pass on any company whose principals dressed in formal wear for pitch meetings.
There’s a basic problem with these kinds of rules.
No rule can be applied universally, without question and no exceptions.
Universal rules are just another form of bigotry—one size does not fit all.
Why would investors buy illiquid stock in a company with no revenues?
What does knowing how many piano tuners there are in the world have to do with being a productive contributor?
There was a time when both these scenarios would have been greeted with you’ve-got-to-be-kidding laughter, but times have changed.
Cynk’s valuation is the result of its claim to sell introductions to famous people.
The interview questions were Google’s, and, as we all know, Google only does smart stuff.
These examples prove that jumping on the wagon to avoid missing out or because an idea/action is sourced from/endorsed by a name brand isn’t always a smart way to go.
Blind stupidity is best avoided through individual, critical thinking.
In other words, that’s the best way to avoid being dressed like the emperor.
But having read the latest I have to revise what I said.
In addition to bad judgment, think gross stupidity.
I suppose I should say “alleged,” but the evidence leaves little doubt regarding just how stupid these bosses were.
Consider the smoking emails between Steven Davis, Dewey’s former chairman; Stephen DiCarmine, the firm’s former executive director; Joel Sanders, the former chief financial officer; and Zachary Warren, a former client relations manager.
Four men, who were charged by New York prosecutors on Thursday with orchestrating a nearly four-year scheme to manipulate the firm’s books to keep it afloat during the financial crisis, talked openly in emails about “fake income,” “accounting tricks” and their ability to fool the firm’s “clueless auditor,” the prosecutors said. (…) One of the men even used the phrase “cooking the books” to describe what they were doing to mislead the firm’s lenders and creditors in setting the stage for a $150 million debt offering…
And ignorance isn’t a viable excuse for lawyers by any stretch of the imagination.
The global number one rule in our post-Enron world is that you do not write anything in emails that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of your newspaper.
In case you aren’t familiar with them, the Darwin Awards“are cautionary tales about people who kill themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race.”
Perhaps there should be a special award for people who kill companies through acts of excessive stupidity.
Moreover, CEO Tim Armstrong moved his foot from his mouth to deep in his throat by blaming the needed cost savings on Obamacare and supporting unusual cases like two women with complicated pregnancies.
When the employees screamed and the poop hit the media fan Armstrong and AOL swiftly backpedaled and reinstated the old policy.
A few years ago occasional contributor Matt Weeks wrote about the “startup social contract” and the repercussions when it’s broken.
If the workers and/or the exec team come to disrespect, disbelieve or ignore this social contract, the company is lost.
Although Matt wrote about the contract in terms of startups, it applies to enterprises of all sizes and ages.
The conference, Women Engineers Code, or WECode, which was organized by an undergraduate student group at Harvard, featured stacks of cosmetic mirrors with the Goldman Sachs logo, a photograph posted to Instagram shows. The Instagram user also said that the bank brought nail files to the event.
One of the attendees wondered if the swag represented “sexyfeminism or gender stereotyping”
I can assure her it didn’t.
To quote a senior manager I’ve known for years, “given the choice between stupidity and malice aforethought the cause is almost always stupidity.”
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Stupidity is rampant; from the 
