But here’s the thing. Are driven, competitive people happier? I don’t think they are. I think they will always want more, more money, more prestige, bigger house, bigger car, bigger yacht, better looking spouse, better looking self, smarter, better looking kids…they can never be satisfied. The more you have, the more you want. It’s a curse.
Takes one to know one. I am pretty competitive and driven myself. It’s a curse. I envy those who are not competitive or driven, who are easily satisfied, like my sister. Such people are the truly blessed. They know genuine happiness.
Not saying that there has to be much in the way of strawman arguments going on in a thread like this, but I’m seeing a lot of strawman arguments going on in this thread…
(And if you think this applies to those you’re arguing against and not you, then no, you’re the one this is intended for.)
I don’t know. Is this a strawman argument? I was talking to an investment banker during the internet craze back in the year 2000. He worked on a $4 billion takeover in the internet space. I asked him how he came up with that valuation. The investment banker told me, and this is exactly what he said, “We made the $4 billion valuation up”. Lol
That company, which was valued at $4 billion, is worth zero today.
It’s an anecdote. How did those internet and telecom stocks do after the bubble?
I know there are some smart investment bankers. I know a few.
@JoanneB please keep it up. There are a lot of delusional people out there that believe the bullcrap. there are a lot of clueless execs whose motivation is based upon pure greed
To the amazement and irritation of employees, Bezos’s criticisms are almost always on target. Bruce Jones, a former Amazon supply chain vice president, describes leading a five-engineer team figuring out ways to make the movement of workers in fulfillment centers more efficient. The group spent nine months on the task, then presented their work to Bezos. “We had beautiful documents, and everyone was really prepared,” Jones says. Bezos read the paper, said, “You’re all wrong,” stood up, and started writing on the whiteboard.
“He had no background in control theory, no background in operating systems,” Jones says. “He only had minimum experience in the distribution centers and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out his argument on the whiteboard, and “every stinking thing he put down was correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove he was wrong, but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff. He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.” http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-excerpt-from-the-everything-store-by-brad-stone#p3
Sure, some Ivy grads lack common sense and some are greedy. But in the gleeful eagerness to highlight that fact, there seems to be an underlying implication that had the finance employees in the anecdotes not been elite school grads but had attended ordinary colleges, they would have been smarter and nobler. It’s more likely that certain jobs both attract certain personality types and consist of environments that produce and reinforce certain behaviors.
How to make the movement of minimum wage workers more efficient??? How about we do a study to make the movements of IB execs more compatible with societal goals? That is probably an impossible problem to solve
TheGFG, you seem to be taking this all quite personally, am I hitting too close to home? If you are a CS grad who worked in MC and married to a guy who does valuation for a living you would know I am not too far off the mark. The NYT and WSJ have both recently published articles about hiring at Google, and Google said that they are no longer focusing on elite schools in hiring because they want people who are humble. Of course not all elite school grads are full of themselves though many are, and they are by no means the only cocky jerks around, I worked with plenty of egomaniacs in IT as well, and some went to state schools. The problem lies in the type of firms I worked in, the type who keeps telling their employees they only hire the best, so many (not all) who get hired think he/she is the best and brightest. Every meeting is all Chiefs and no Indians. Thanks to the cut throat performance reviews. it’s every man for himself, take all the credit you can for every success and blame whoever you can blame except yourself for every failure. If you don’t have confidence, you get eaten alive in these companies.
Joanne- ever been treated by an oncologist? They think they are god’s representative here on earth. Ever had a consult with a neurologist? Ever have a meeting with your Congressman (or woman) or been given the brush-off by his or her chief of staff? For that matter- ever have a matter come before your local zoning board?
Your posts suggest that you think that only people in I-banking walk the earth like they own it (and you). The chair of my local zoning board (a graduate of the local state directional college) has made a career out of being a Master of the Universe with zero financial capability to back it up. He can blather on about economic development in front of a tv camera with absolutely no idea about the impact of his decisions on the local tax base, traffic, future state tax revenues, etc. Political glad-hander but an utter moron.
At least the egomaniacs in medicine have an actual skill… although when I completed my last jury duty (a medical malpractice case-- several doctors at our local hospital involved) I wasn’t so sure about that either.
There are jerks in every line of business, graduating from every college in the country.
Blossom, it’s surgeons who think they are divine, not oncologists (disclosure: my wife is an oncologist).
I think there is a thread in the American self-image that says that the little guy is actually smarter and better than the big guy, that the guy with no education knows more about what is really going on than the person with the ivory-tower education, that the guy in the plant knows more than the CEO. To some extent, I think this idea is healthy, because it’s sort of an anti-classism.
And you’ll even sometimes hear people say that better baseball is played in minor league parks than in the major leagues. But, well.
I think you may be conflating some ideas in your head. I’ve tried to find the claims that ‘google are no longer focusing on elite school grads BECAUSE they want people that are humble.’ And I could not.
It is true that the NYTimes, in an interview with Lazlo Bock of Google, writes that ‘humillity’ is one of the five hiring attributes that the company has "Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”
And it also says "And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s “intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.
And it is true that they are hiring more people without college degrees. And they have also said “Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one — besides brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
But I think you created the idea in your head that as a result of desiring ‘humility’, Google has decided ‘they are no longer focusing on elite schools’. Maybe those two propositions are true, but I don’t think the former is the cause for the latter. Perhaps it reveals your own unanalyzed assumptions and prejudices about elite schools?
But if you could show me that the desire for humility is the cause for not focusing on elite schools, I’d be grateful.
Sounds like you work, or worked, is a toxic work environment, JoanneB. But just because the GFG doesn’t agree with your comments doesn’t men she is personalizing them. My s’s work at one of those highly desired, hard-to-get-hired-into places, and it would be easy for the employees to feel cocky. But in their particular division they have what they call a “no aholes” policy, because several of the folks in this division came from a company that grew quickly, and went from being largely, truly a bunch of the “best and brightest” to hiring too quickly, and they began to find that some of the new hires were aholes. So, in this newer venture, they were/are careful not to do that if at all possible, and so far this group does truly have employees who are scary smart, work well together and don’t strut around fluffing their feathers. It probably makes it even harder to get hired in, and there are many many layers of interviews, but their work associates are a group of great people who seem to play well in the sandbox together.
There are likely jerks in every work environment. Some just seem to have more than others. And some of it is due to the corporate culture. Not every environment is cut-throat. And not every work environmewnt with bright, motivated, hard-working employees is “all chiefs and no indians”. Those overgeneralizations IMO weaken the credibility of your opinions.
Hunt-you may be right about surgeons- but with the notable exception of your wife, I’ve found that oncologists are the worst at the communicating/playing well with others/bedside manner component of medicine.
My point though- is that all colleges graduate jerks. All businesses/organizations employ people whose self-image is in no way justified by their actual talent. It’s just too easy to pick on bankers when so many other tempting targets are in front of us.
Ever try and argue a parking ticket with a municipal clerk? You can have a photograph of the meter (showing time left) which is date-stamped, bring a notarized statement by a witness (unrelated- the guy who owns the dry cleaning store in front of the parking meter) and still be treated like you are a worthless and stupid piece of you know what…and by the way- that will be $20.
A friend who is a CEO of a small company, and by the way is a Wharton grad, keeps getting told by the company board he needs to be “more optimistic” with investors. It is clear to him he will lose his job if he tells the unvarnished truth, but he is a very honest individual so it is difficult for him to engage in financial hyperbole. Similarly, a friend’s son just starting out was told that the way to get high-rollers to invest in their new company is not to tell them what sort of profit they will make. They already have loads of money, so they allegedly don’t care. The way to get them to invest is to assure them the start-up will be the next big deal, like Google or Amazon, so they will have the ego-fulfilling privilege of bragging they got in on the ground floor. Now if he thinks the company will be only moderately successful, but is charged with raising a lot of capital and needs his job, what should he do? He has to follow the advice of the people paying his salary.
It’s very short-sighted to blame certain types of employees, namely Ivy finance types, when the whole capitalist system is ultra-competitive. It’s not a perfect system, and there is plenty of responsibility to be spread around, including to ordinary people like middle class parents trying to pay for college who demand a good return on their investments…
These are big issues you bring up. The issue of lying about a company’s prospects. The first example with the CEO…,lying may be a crime. CEOs have to sign off that the financial statements are correct. I guess that is not what is happening here. I guess there is a fine line.
If a CEO tells investors a company is going to have $1 billion sales when there is no freaking way, the CEO may lose his job. If the CEO doesn’t do what the board wants, he may lose his job. Maybe the CEO should try to find another company to run.
Most of us are investors. What the CEO is being told sucks.
Your second example is marketing. Find what the investor wants and push that. That’s ok.
