[baddox]

> but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.

This is actually an argument I wish would come up more often in cases where prominent people are fired or lose opportunities due to misconduct. Critics invariably react as if there aren't hundreds or thousands of qualified people for the position who didn't conduct themselves inappropriately, but I would argue that there almost always were.

There are hundreds of talented directors who could direct your children's movie and never tweeted about molesting children in a movie theater.

[microtherion]

In general, I agree, and I also agree this is not acknowledged often enough.

I can think of one exception, though: I think Apple would have done significantly worse if they had forced Steve Jobs out in response to the option backdating scandal or the non-poaching collusion scandal.

[barry-cotter]

That’s not an exception; that’s the norm. Talent in every field is wildly unequally distributed. Messi makes the average international player look kind of ok. The average international player makes club players look like a weekend hobby player. The hobby player can run rings around people who don’t care about football.

Satya Nadella has what? Quintupled Microsoft’s market capitalization during his tenure? Steve Ballmer was so bad the stock jumped ~20% on the news he was resigning.

[barry-cotter]

Qualified is not the same as good. Passing the minimum quality bar to be acceptable on some level is very different to having even one success, never mind having multiple, massive successes.

Qualified is what you’re looking for in areas so routinised that everyone is adequate and no one is worth even ten times the average performer.