Choosing the wrong advisers
12:38:56 2023-06-21 619

Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, decision makers stack the deck by turning to like-minded advisers. In a study of CEOs, for example, those at companies with poor financial performance (measured by market-to-book value) were more likely than those at high-performing ones to seek advice from executives in the same industry and with a similar functional background. The result was limited strategic change—less product-market and geographic diversification. What’s more, several field studies confirm that advice seekers are more receptive to guidance from friends or other likable people. Though friendship, accessibility, and nonthreatening personalities all impart high levels of comfort and trust, they have no relation to the quality or thoughtfulness of the advice.

Seekers also fail to think creatively enough about the expertise they need—which fields might bring valuable insight, who has solved a similar problem before, whose knowledge is most relevant, whose experience is the best fit—or cast a wide enough net to find it. Unfortunately, to make sense of a messy, volatile world, leaders often shoehorn people into tidy categories that don’t reflect their full range of wisdom. That’s a mistake President John F. Kennedy made leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion. He didn’t consult Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg for advice, assuming that Goldberg lacked a background in military matters. But as the journalist David Halberstam describes in The Best and the Brightest, Goldberg had run guerrilla operations during World War II, so he understood that guerrillas were “no good at all in confronting regular units.” He explained to the president: “Whenever we used them like that, we’d always lose all our people….But you didn’t think of that—and you put me in the category of just a Secretary of Labor.”

 

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