“Given leadership literature is rife with stories of rejected individuals going on to become great leaders”
The selection effect can be very misleading here — in that literature you usually don’t hear from all the individuals who were selected and failed, nor those who were rejected correctly and would have failed, and so on. Lots of advice from the start-up/business sector is super sus for this exact reason.
Yes in publishing stories there’s plenty of suspect motives. But really I’m basing this on my own personal experience in seeing so many not obvious leaders blow everyone away and the obvious winners not at all so guaranteed to succeed. So many get into high level schools for reasons beyond their personal talent, and so many others blossom late. The pool of people enabled by society/parents to get into elite schools is much smaller than the huge pool of average grade, lower income people who didn’t give a shite about school when they’re were 18 and later blossom with their tough background giving them huge grit and ambition. EA tends to fail to see this to their diminishment. Spreadsheet criteria doesn’t capture grit and ambition. Mentoring pipelines do.
Have you engaged with AIM’s selection process? It seems to me that you are talking about it as if it was based on just traditional markers of success / potential—what you call “obvious leaders”. When in fact it is mostly task based (including social skills). Actually I don’t remember them ever asking me where I went to college. If you have ideas on how to improve the selection process (other than make it less rigorous) so that they can catch more of these “hidden gems”, I’m sure they’ll love to see them.
“Given leadership literature is rife with stories of rejected individuals going on to become great leaders”
The selection effect can be very misleading here — in that literature you usually don’t hear from all the individuals who were selected and failed, nor those who were rejected correctly and would have failed, and so on. Lots of advice from the start-up/business sector is super sus for this exact reason.
Yes in publishing stories there’s plenty of suspect motives. But really I’m basing this on my own personal experience in seeing so many not obvious leaders blow everyone away and the obvious winners not at all so guaranteed to succeed. So many get into high level schools for reasons beyond their personal talent, and so many others blossom late. The pool of people enabled by society/parents to get into elite schools is much smaller than the huge pool of average grade, lower income people who didn’t give a shite about school when they’re were 18 and later blossom with their tough background giving them huge grit and ambition. EA tends to fail to see this to their diminishment. Spreadsheet criteria doesn’t capture grit and ambition. Mentoring pipelines do.
Have you engaged with AIM’s selection process? It seems to me that you are talking about it as if it was based on just traditional markers of success / potential—what you call “obvious leaders”. When in fact it is mostly task based (including social skills). Actually I don’t remember them ever asking me where I went to college. If you have ideas on how to improve the selection process (other than make it less rigorous) so that they can catch more of these “hidden gems”, I’m sure they’ll love to see them.