Good advice can become bad leadership when applied without context. Strong leaders understand when popular business rules work and when they break down.
One thing I like about physics is that its laws generally hold within clearly defined conditions. Classical mechanics works quite well at everyday scales, even if it breaks down at relativistic or quantum extremes (thermodynamics tends to hold universally). Business advice is different; it often sounds universal, but how well it actually applies depends heavily on context.
One famous piece of advice is to always hire people smarter than you. This gets misattributed to lots of famous businesspeople, although its true origin remains a mystery. (Hopefully the well-researched Quote Investigator will tackle it.)
Now it doesn’t literally mean only hire people with a bigger IQ; rather, it’s about finding people who have skills and talents that supplement what is missing from the team. They may know more about a subject, or have a mind that’s well suited to a particular way of thinking. I have a high IQ and strong math skills, but many people could run circles around me when it comes to creative writing. Likewise, many salespeople across the intelligence spectrum have the skills necessary for selling that many of my academic friends simply lack.
But even if we take “smarter” broadly, it’s still not always good advice. Suppose I was running a McDonald’s franchise. Do I need a brilliant abstract thinker working the fry station, or do I need someone reliable, careful, and able to follow a process consistently under pressure? In truth, if I got some great mathematician or artist working that station, at best they’d get bored and quit; worse, they could get distracted and cause problems. In a standardized fast-food environment, the goal is not culinary brilliance; it is consistency, speed, safety, and reliability. While top chefs may be better than average chefs, a good fry station worker at McDonald’s isn’t that different from an average fry station worker. The same may be true for bus drivers, custodial staff, medical billers, etc. For jobs like this, what matters more are traits of reliability, conscientiousness, and trust. The best workers at a fast-food restaurant aren’t necessarily the smartest ones, but the people who say, “I can cover Friday night,” and you can trust that they will show up. (Not everyone needs to be a deep thinker, and there’s nothing wrong with people whose skills lie elsewhere.)
And this is true for most business advice. “The biggest risk is not taking any risk,” was popularized by Mark Zuckerberg (as with many quotes, its origin is debated, though it is often popularized or misattributed to various people). Good advice for startup founders, bad advice for those running nuclear reactors. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning,” said Bill Gates. Often true, but then companies also talk about firing customers whose demands exceed their value. Some people are too demanding or just like to complain, and the only thing they provide is frustration, not revenue.
This, to me, is what makes business fun and challenging. For every “rule” there’s an exception, or perhaps more generally a set of assumptions under which it’s true or not true. Sometimes those assumptions are obvious, other times they are not.
The Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” works better when the thing being broken is a low-stakes product feature. It works far less well in areas where mistakes can harm patients, consumers, workers, or public trust. We’ve seen the consequences of the move-fast-and-break-things mentality in health care and biotech (Theranos and uBiome fraud), cryptocurrency and financial services (Mt. Gox collapse and FTX fraud), and even regulated services (sexual assault, fraud, and the asset devaluation of taxi medallions from ride-sharing services like Uber). I don’t oppose any of these services on principle, but they all rushed in and cut corners, resulting in serious consequences for many involved. (For the record, I actually think, “move quick, but be thoughtful” works out better in most cases.)
The most successful people are the ones who understand these subtleties. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to express. In politics, it’s often observed that the Democratic Party’s policies don’t fit on a bumper sticker. It’s easier for some conservatives to succinctly say, “no immigrants” than for liberals to propose, “we need a nuanced policy that balances the traditional American value of inclusiveness with concerns about scale, enforcement, assimilation, labor markets, and public resources.” Likewise, it’s easy to quote a short, pithy saying, while ignoring the nuances of its range of applicability.
Like classical Newtonian laws of physics, the applicability of such popular business advice is wide, but not absolute. The best leaders understand where advice applies and know where the model breaks down. Poor leaders treat advice as an absolute. As with most things, wisdom differs from knowledge. As you take advice from my articles or elsewhere, always consider why it holds true and under what conditions it may no longer hold. Otherwise, you’re liable to follow good advice straight over a cliff the moment the underlying conditions change.
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