The golfing ones are a bit more extroverted and charismatic than the non-golfers; they "look like CEOs". They are more likely than the non-golfing ones to have attended a top-tier MBA program. Their average height is significantly greater than the non-golfers. And so on; you see where I'm going.
Certainly there are plenty of introverted, socially challenged golfers out there. But within any population whether CEOs or lawyers or cops or musicians or whatever else, the subset of people who golf is going to be, on average, more extroverted than the subset of people who don't.
I think this somewhat ties in to Taleb's argument that you should trust surgeons who don't look like surgeons, since their achievement of professional success despite their tendency to create a negative first impression is a robust heuristic of professional competence[0].
The population of non-golfers, averaged out as a population, were held to subtly higher standards that required better performance out of them. This means that non-golfers, as a population, tend to be more challenged at work over the course of their careers, and that it was less likely that individuals could "fail up" -- the Peter Principle extends further for extroverts.
Anyway that's my theory.
0: https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg...
In order to become a successful CEO (or team lead or spouse...), you do need to be able to muster the emotional backbone to have tough conversations with people. One thing that can hold you back from this is the internal worry about being an asshole. Unless you are able to say to yourself, "I hear a voice on my shoulder telling me I'm a terrible person. But this topic needs to be discussed and I need to do advocacy here. This is uncomfortable and I don't like it but I'm going to do it anyway", you will under-communicate and issue won't get resolved.
However:
1) It is possible to err. That difficult conversation? Might in fact just be you being an asshole. We are not lucky enough to live in a world with a 100% surefire way to avoid this. So, good communication involves being willing to risk some probability of being an asshole.
2) People without that "maybe you're being an asshole" voice are not going to have this problem.
In my experience, most people will accept feedback if you do it in a respectful manner.
You can tell someone they are underperforming without insulting them. Respect your employees.
Even when you tell people to read the manual, you can do so in a way that doesn’t feel insulting. There’s a world of a difference between “RTFM!” and “I believe the documentation addresses this problem on page X.”
Bingo. God I wish more software developers realized this. Being open with criticism is important. But for most people who are not a very certain type of programmer, we don't want to hear the criticism given with words like:
"What were you thinking? Are you stupid? Of course you don't do x."
and
"I've found through experience that it's important to do X, because if you don't, then Y happens."
The fact that I run into so many people on software developer teams that communicate in the former manner has led me to leave traditional software development in favor of data analysis where I don't have to work on a team of 5-6 people, of whom 2-3 are complete assholes.
Plus, if you want to know why there are so few women in programming, this alone is a huge factor. Yes, there are a very few women who can give and take criticism in the abrasive fashion I outlined above, but most women prefer to give and take criticism in the polite, productive manner of my second example. Once again, the criticism is the same in both examples, all that's different is the tone.
Too many people in the software development industry have taken Linus Torvald's communication style as something to emulate.
It's the people who are either oblivious to the need to carefully communicate who are the difficult ones, along with those who intentionally ignore societal norms in an effort to prove their "alpha" status.
I think I've finally realized how to articulate what my frustration with statements of the form "If you're worried about X, you're fine" is. The person presenting the worry has a prior of [I am worried about this]. They then go seeking a solution that will let them alleviate the worry by taking concrete steps to address it. When they run into the advice "If you're worried, you're fine", they have two problems:
1) If being worried is the only reason why they are at least acceptable, then to continue to be acceptable, they need to continue to be worried.
2) They haven't actually gotten a concrete action to take or thought exercise to go through. That means if the commenter is wrong and they actually do have a habit to work on, the only thing they might be doing differently is telling their intuition (system 1 for the Khanemann fans) "Hey, you know that alarm? turn it off." Their intuition probably doesn't listen very well and probably keeps them worried, but it is also no longer acting as a useful signal whatsoever of the problem.
----
The approach I would take is to come up with a list of actually-answerable questions to ask myself, to have faith in my intuitions on those questions unless I get concrete evidence that they are wrong, and then to work to make peace with the remaining discomfort. For example, when driving a car:
- Buy a wide-angle rear-view mirror so you have better spatial awareness.
- When opening any car door from the insite, habitually practice doing the Dutch reach.
- When you are aware of a cyclist, know the reference points on the car that you should keep them at so you are a safe passing distance.
- Don't do anything else besides perhaps converse with another human in the car while I'm driving.
- Practice scanning my environment while driving and other generally-safe driving habits.
- Having practiced your duty of care -- Accept the reality that at some point I might end up crushing another person's ribcage and snuffing out the life of someone's father/brother/aunt/teacher -- a fellow human.
Try re-reading a peer performance review you've written after the fact. It can be eye-opening.
You can replay an event in a supportive feedback group instead of in your head.
(I've never been to a Toastmasters' meeting, but have heard their sales pitch.)
What _does_ a typical surgeon look like, then? I didn't know they had a look.
That's why vague claims (like in the google debacle) that women are biologically less suited to coding than men might not be relevant to your organisation even if we were to believe it true in general.
A similar effect may explain some of this: https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-comprehensive-case-for-investing...
Would be a fun topic for research!
Maybe those underperforming companies will bounce back and you'll find a (much delayed) response in the author's mailbox a few months down the line!
Likewise, many companies have a comments toll free number. Almost nobody will call them (who has a comment about their toothpaste), but it turns out the type of person who does call those numbers is likely the type of person who tells all their friends which is the best toothpaste, and so it is important that whoever answers that phone is an expert on what makes their toothpaste great. (honest answers are important - this type of person already knows their stuff so lies will hurt)
Also, CEOs often know they have trouble connecting with their real customers. If a real customer writes, that is real information that they cannot easily get in any other way. A good CEO will pay attention because what one person writes 100 others think but don't say at all.
All of the above are things that make a CEO who doesn't respond under perform.
The author is certain that the CEOs responded personally. He says, "[CEO] wrote me a two-page letter that addressed my ideas point by point", "[CEO] sent me a handwritten letter", and "[CEO] forwarded my ideas to his marketing leaders".
I try my best not to write anymore, I have interns that can do this. I need to be putting my resources to my expertise, coding.
No. Most companies fail simply because they don't sell enough stuff. There's an old joke that "revenue solves all problems" in business. Simply put--companies fail when they don't build a big enough customer base.
CEOs who read and react to customer feedback are focused on the most important thing to their business: their customers. I would definitely not characterize that as a "waste of time." I'd argue it is some of the most valuable uses of time that a CEO can spend.
To be fair, you can't always be working. Sometimes you need to wind down, and golfing or responding to your customers does sound like something a CEO would do while winding down.
That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1].
Granted, even if this were statistically significant you can think of explanations why it makes sense: "These CEOs have thought so deeply about their business that responding to these letters is trivial", or "Being forced to answer these questions is beneficial for the CEOs business acumen".
Of course the most likely explanation is that the correlation is just spurious and the two things are unrelated.
Still, would be an interesting study!
1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-golf-rounds-indicate-poor...