[lapcat]

> I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are gods and not fallible mortals.

All humans make mistakes. Very bad mistakes. Even very smart people. Depending on circumstances and level of power, some people suffer the consequences of their mistakes, and others don't.

One common mistake of leaders is to surround themselves with "yes men" who never criticize them or tell them the truth. Leaders can become very detached from reality, but their power allows them to survive and even thrive in a state of reality detachment. And these leaders always have people who will defend them no matter what and paint them as infallible geniuses because of their power, which is part of what contributes to never suffering the consequences of mistakes.

[urthor]

Everyone makes mistakes.

But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23771902/

Diagnostic errors by Doctors are probably the gold standard of being error free. My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

[lapcat]

> What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

This may be important to determine liability in a malpractice lawsuit, but otherwise I'm not sure why we should care much why someone was mistaken if we're all agreed that the decision was mistaken.

The difference here is that we're not even agreed that Apple's culture of secrecy is wrong. It's a controversy. If we're talking about a diagnostic error by a doctor, we're assuming there's no controversy over whether it was actually wrong.

Two vastly different scenarios:

1) Tim Cook made a mistake but made the best decision he could given the information at the time.

2) Tim Cook didn't make a mistake.

If you're willing to agree on 1, and that Apple's culture should change, then I'm happy to grant you "made the best decision he could given the information at the time", or at least not argue it too much, because the culture is the important matter, and not the thoughts inside Tim Cook's brain.

"Assume he's smart" is vastly different than "Assume he's right".

There are many times in my career when I look at code that I'd previously written and wonder "What the heck was I thinking???" It's an interesting question psychologically, but still, I fully recognize that the code I wrote was bad. And regardless of how much time I spend on post-mortem analysis, the crucial thing is to fix the code.

[ClumsyPilot]

> But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time

I never met a person who commited to a mistake, and thought they were wrong at the time. Have you?

> My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

How do you arrive at this number? For a doctor there is a clear correct and wrong diagnosis. For a corporate CEO, who decided against doing a merger, how do you even know that decision was taken at all? How do you known if it was right or wrong? You can't simulate an alternative business.

Suppose you could simulate it accurately, and the revenue were up, profit margin is down, and stock price is up - is that good or bad? You can't even determine, non subjectively, which option is better