Mark Osborne critiques a CEO who hired yes-men instead of strong leaders willing to challenge bad ideas. The CEO used a "hockey stick" growth metaphor that masked weak fundamentals. Building a real leadership team means hiring people who push back, not people who agree.
I remember the CEO always talked about this hockey stick curve. He's like, it's a hockey stick, it's hockey stick, we're just on this flat part of the hockey stick. And that— and he always talked about how it's gonna, you know, the stick's on the ground and we're just gonna zoom up all of a sudden. Yeah, go slow. But I think the problem was the hockey stick was on its side, okay? It was too long. He didn't— he put the hockey stick in the wrong angle. But, um, you know, what, what my advice would be is— and, and I think what his mistake was is he didn't find the right core guys to run the different departments at his organization. He found yes-men. Okay. He found it was buddies from his previous job and smart guy, but the people that were working with him didn't want to tell him no. Interesting. They didn't ever want to tell him, hey, that's, that's the wrong idea. And it was, look, it was personality, right? You know, I've been fortunate enough to work with other leaders who, when you come to them and say, hey, this is, this is not a good idea, instead of them telling you, you know what, you know, stay in your lane,
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