
Must startup founders be charismatic? - ttunguz
http://tomtunguz.com/must-startup-founders-be-charismatic
======
smalter
In Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about how he was surprised to discover the
opposite of the typical, gregarious CEO. He found that CEOs building great
companies that last were quiet, modest, and humble and attributed company
success to others rather than drawing attention to him/herself.

A model for that for me is Tony Hsieh. He's a quiet, thoughtful guy, and he's
always talking about luck and attributing Zappos's success to the company's
values, not his own genius.

~~~
SatvikBeri
I wouldn't trust _Good to Great_. Almost all the predictions it made turned
out to be wrong. Contrast this to _The Innovator's Dilemma_ , where most of
the predictions the author made turned out to be correct.

More detail from the Wikipedia Article[1]: "Steven D. Levitt describes how he
was inspired to read the book by the "phenomenon" it had become, and noted
that many of the companies selected as "great" had since got into serious
troubles, such as Circuit City, while only Nucor had "dramatically
outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done
okay". Overall, investing in the portfolio of those 11 companies in 2001 would
result in actually underperforming the S&P 500[4] Levitt concluded that books
like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the
future.[5]"

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great>

~~~
dave_sullivan
I brought up Good to Great on HN once (re: this exact topic) and got a similar
reply. Just because it failed to accurately predict the future doesn't mean
there isn't any valuable information in there. It's certainly not on my top 10
list of best books ever, but it's not on my list of books I wish I'd never
read either.

It suggests that some of the best run companies are run by non-charismatic
CEOs--I agree with that. Read it and make up your own mind. Or don't, but come
off the whole "That book will poison your mind" thing.

~~~
saurik
To verify (I have not read the book, and am honestly asking so I can figure
out whether I should, based on these comments bringing it up): does the book
then have reasons to believe the things it says other than "these are
successful companies [apparently false] so let's see how they are run"?

