I think there is an important point here that might be missed, that is that self awareness is an important piece of leadership. Especially the point that "even now he tricks himself into not thinking about the hardest things." Because to do the job requires operating under existential stress. I have seen that stress destroy CEOs.
I've shared this before but I was in well performing publicly traded startup as the dot com crash happened and the CEO became effectively catatonic. I reached out to Scott McNealy because I knew when Sun had hit hard times it's leadership hadn't responded in that way. And Scott told me that how people respond in extreme stress is unpredictable, as a result his strategy was to try to create points of extreme stress for managers to get a sense of whether they would become a rabbit or a tiger. The folks to tended toward rabbit were moved into jobs unlikely to encounter extreme stress and the others could move into the riskier (but often better compensated) jobs.
Thanks I am going to bookmarked this. We have been in somewhat less stress, or at least non existential stress since 2008, rising interest rate is back. And I had a conversion with a young SME CEO who said the current Interest rate is not normal and will get back to "normal" in a few years. A lot of the current risk are new to pretty much anyone younger than 40-45.
Which leads to me witness something similar to CEO or manager being effectively catatonic. And test on whether they are rabbit or tiger. I wish I read this a few years earlier.
The surprising part for me is that there does not seem anyway to know ahead of time how someone is going to go. Something that I've wondered about but have no way to pursue is whether or not military training for combat can train the correct response for existential stress. My thinking is that if it can be trained then one could possibly be trained to deal with those sorts of situations effectively. It definitely is NOT something that they train in business school or MBA programs though.
>Something that I've wondered about but have no way to pursue is whether or not military training for combat can train the correct response for existential stress.
Similar thoughts here. And that is somewhat along the line of Andy Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive.
On another note. I was stressed out on that day and the one thing that helped me in Jensen's interview, and it clicked the moment I heard it;
David: What is something that you believe today that 40-year-old Jensen would’ve pushed back on and said, no, I disagree.
Jensen: There’s plenty of time. If you prioritize yourself properly and you make sure that you don’t let Outlook be the controller of your time, there’s plenty of time.
Nice to hear. It's really a job for the clueless or the insane. Everyone else's humanity gets fucked up by the mindless machine that is the post modern corporation.
I've shared this before but I was in well performing publicly traded startup as the dot com crash happened and the CEO became effectively catatonic. I reached out to Scott McNealy because I knew when Sun had hit hard times it's leadership hadn't responded in that way. And Scott told me that how people respond in extreme stress is unpredictable, as a result his strategy was to try to create points of extreme stress for managers to get a sense of whether they would become a rabbit or a tiger. The folks to tended toward rabbit were moved into jobs unlikely to encounter extreme stress and the others could move into the riskier (but often better compensated) jobs.