you're changing the goalposts

we were talking about leaders of nations, and now you are talking about the unrelated honorific applied to sports stars

so if you're changing the subject, i'll take that as your intellectually dishonest way of conceding my point here

i'm glad i've been able to show you something about your world. it's ugly. it's unfortunate. but it's reality we have to deal with

okay, you don't like that stalin was a leader, he didn't deserve it

i agree with you

but how are you going to change that?

welcome to an ugly aspect of your reality

A leaders job is to lead the group to as good an outcome as possible (i.e. it is the task that the leader was chosen to do)

the guy who is focusing his effort on getting a good outcome for society has no time to maintain his leadership. so someone else leads

A leader who is only good at remaining the leader... he/she is a good Narcissist.

i agree. and? so what. yes, absolutely: leading societies is the work of truly gifted and screwed up people. demagogues. this is a problem about human nature, but that doesn't make the problem magically. the problem is baked into how we function as social groups, there is no avoiding it

you seem to live in this insulated ivory tower that doesn't know, understand, nor accept certain unfortunate but unavoidably true aspects of human behavior. your concept of an ideal leader will always, always, wind up being some guy who works for the actual leaders. the actual leaders are the guys who spend most of their tiem acquiring and maintaining their leadership. playing a game that you dislike, but who cares if you like it. the game is part of your reality. that you don't like it doesn't make it go away

you don't bother acknowledging that the game of jockeying for control and keeping it is the real subject called leadership, and the entire domain you call leadership is actually a separate sideshow that comes after and is subservient to the real topic at hand: the ugly ways leadership is acquired and maintained

welcome to reality. acknowledge it. then form your opinions

that may be the status quo, but the status quo is a failed concept

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?

A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

this is about GPA, not SAT, but they take home is that scores on academic tests are shit, because the "academic environment is an artificial environment". it focuses on skills that don't really help in the job. colleges need to change what they value, because what they value does not adequately prepare people for life

also:

Q. Other insights from the studies you’ve already done?

A. On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.

Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.

Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

On the leadership side, we’ve found that leadership is a more ambiguous and amorphous set of characteristics than the work we did on the attributes of good management, which are more of a checklist and actionable.

We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06...

what has google concluded about best hiring practices?

the emphasis should be on behavioral analysis. to glean someone's social intelligence

case closed

there are people of great social skill and malicious intent, and people of great social skill and good intent. you confuse intent and ability. if you can't tell the difference you're only announcing your own lack of social skills

you've just condemned the society the person is in, not the person's intelligence or character. indeed, there are people of great intelligence stuck in shitty jobs the world over. only because their society is so shit there is no path for them to improve themselves, through no fault of their own. people of truly exceptional social intelligence then probably quit anyway and start a revolution

where a leader takes society has no meaning

whether or not a leader obtains and retains leadership does

you are talking about subject matter that has nothing to do with the topic of being a good leader or not

what is the value of a guy with good ideas for society who has no power?

get the power. then we can talk. if you can't do that, you are not a good leader nor a bad leader. you're simply not a leader. you simply don't matter on the topic

stop injecting an unrelated judgment on an unrelated parameter into the subject at hand

There's plenty of socially intelligent people with shitty jobs. There's plenty of people with crap social skills who are very successful at their jobs.

if you're socially intelligent, you know you don't need to stay in a shitty job. therefore, your example is incoherent

likewise, show me someone who is not socially intelligent and successful, and i'll show you someone operating in the same domain who is socially intelligent and yet even more successful, due to being more socially intelligent

for example, programming is in demand so programmers can be very successful, even the ones with shitty social skills. but within that domain, those programmers who are also socially intelligent are yet even more successful

Of course bad decisions that degrade the performance of the group are failures of the leader.

absolutely wrong. failure of leadership is failing to achieve or failing to hold on to the position of leadership

if the entire society goes to shit, but you retain leadership, you're a successful leader

Just like a chemist who accomplishes nothing but retaining his job is not a successful chemist.

no. a chemist who makes a discovery is a successful chemist. whether or not his lab is clean has no bearing on his status as such. to say he has dirty beakers does not mean he has failed at chemistry. just like you saying a leader failed to do {X} or {Y}, which has no bearing on him actually obtaining or retaining leadership, somehow magically has any meaning. it doesn't. you're just projecting your agenda onto an outside domain, and expecting that to matter for some reason, when your agenda really has no meaning as to whether or not a leader succeeds or fails

again, you are applying judgments on parameters that have nothing to do with the actual success or failure of the job

yes, while the guy who does good on his SAT is usually also socially intelligent as well, as you say, my point is that the guy who does poorly on his SAT but is socially intelligent, will be more successful in life, and is more intelligent according to the most important measure, than the guy who has stellar SAT scores but can't persuade or impress for shit

there are people who think, for example, an amazing ability to manipulate complex topological shapes in your head means you're somehow a more intelligent person or will be a more successful person than a guy who can't do much math at all, but is charismatic

that's my point here

Especially when the -- well known -- standard unit of measure is "Libraries of Congresses".

It was tested by the same guys that tested the Boeing 787 for only 247 days ...

having social intelligence is not a magic cloak of perfection, it is merely the most important kind of intelligence in terms of all the types of intelligence in regards to your success or not

and then you go off on a tangent about leadership. off topic, but i'll follow regardless:

you've given me examples of leaders making stupid decisions according to your judgment outside of the domain of leadership. so what. they're still the leader. that's the point. the skill of obtaining and retaining leadership has nothing to do with listening to engineers or academics. it's about being the person making the decision

The more successful leader types know their own limitations and use expert advisors - and listens to them.

nope. you're imposing an outside judgment of quality that has no meaning to the domain of what leadership is and how it works

whatever decision they make on other aspects of society because they have power: correct, mediocre, or absolutely destructive, doesn't even matter. if they can sway enough idiots with enough passion to retain power, that's all that matters. mao's great leap forward was beyond stupid, it was a tragedy of the death of millions. so what? he was still the dude in charge. making a decision that would cost him his leadership would be the real failure of leadership

that's the definition of success according to the parameters of being a leader: obtaining it, retaining it. that's it. that's the only yardstick to measure quality

actually advancing society, humanity, technology, science: who fucking cares? you are imposing an outside judgment of success that actually has no value in terms of success in that actual domain

whatever the academics in the ivory tower see or think or perceive, their opinion: who gives a fuck. does it mean i get more power? no? whatever

if you're a chemist, and you discover an amazing new catalyst, you're successful according to that domain: chemistry. but according to the guy who cleans your equipment, you're a dismal failure because you keep a messy lab. is his judgment of your success or lack thereof somehow magically more important than what you've achieved in the domain of chemistry?

likewise your judgment of what success is in leadership: an outside measure according to parameters that have no impact on obtaining and retaining leadership, is without merit

address the fundamentals of the domain to make a judgment call on success or failure in that domain

SAT and IQ tests certain domains that are predictive of intelligence and achievement but don't gauge the most important intelligence for life: social intelligence

much as you can have as autistic savant/ asperger's individual who can play 12 games of chess in his head but doesn't know the difference between the price of a candy bar and a car, the rest of us also have small mental domains where we are geniuses, but in other domains we are idiots. all of us. for those who attach much value to topological manipulation or word memorization, tested intelligences, real life will come as a shock when someone else who isn't "smart," according to traditional testing methods, achieves highly and surpasses the "smart" individuals, because they are able to perceive, communicate, and manipulate in the social sphere of life at a more advanced level

social intelligence is the real iq, the real true intelligence, and the most crucial and vital mental skill you can have in your life. the rest are pathetic sideshows. there are math professors who can't balance their checkbooks. see the problem?

btw, i scored near perfect on my SAT and very highly on my IQ tests. i attach no self-worth to either. they are cute little games, sandboxed kiddie stuff, not my sense of meaning in life. anyone who attaches meaning to their SAT scores or IQ tests is, in all serious, an idiot

I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.

- Response upon being questioned as to his IQ, in interview with Deborah Solomon "The Science of Second-Guessing", The New York Times (12 December 2004).

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/S...

Watch a little Fox "News" ...