Being Famous For Being Famous

As the technology practice lead of Pythia Cyber, I try to stay away from the behavioral side of things except as a follower but today I am going to be a little out of my lane. Perhaps my behavioral science counterpart will have something to post in reply.

But today I am going to make an exception: I am going to talk about some human behavior that I encounter on the technology side of things because this behavior illustrates a key concept of our philosophy.

The behavior is the technology hiring equivalent of being famous for being famous. According to Professor Google, here is the origin of this catch phrase:

Coined by historian Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1961 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, defining a celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness".

The analogy to which I refer is being hired as a leader because you were hired as a leader. The key concept this illustrates is the faulty logic in relying on certifications or experience or both. Just as some people seem to be celebrities simply by virtue of being well-known, so it is that some people are senior leaders in the technology space in the present simply by virtue of having been a senior leader at some point in the past.

For example, I co-founded a company in the heady days of the dot-com boom years and was the CTO. I like to think that I did a pretty good job, including delivering a working prototype which got us big buy-out offer from an established company, writing a successful US Patent application and combining leadership of a team that did things I could not while delivering technical contributions in my own domain. My objectivity is suspect, of course, but I think that these are provable facts.

However, as soon as I moved on from that enterprise I began to be offered other CTO or SVP positions in only tangentially-related fields. This was flattering, at first. Then it was a bit much and finally it was kind of annoying and distracting.

Why wasn't this attention a boon? It was a bore, not a boon, because it was not based on anything meaningful. This attention from finance people who had only on criterion: that some other finance person had blessed me as a technology expert. There was no real validation of my performance, let alone an awareness of what had been demonstrated as my strengths or weaknesses. This attention was like the attention that a lesbian might get at an airport bar: theoretically flattering but actually at best a nuisance.

This experience has led me to be rather cynical when I encounter fellow senior technologists who seem to be bad at their jobs. There are more of these than one might expect. Before this experience, I used to waste time wondering how these people got their current job and the answer that they had had a similar title in their last job didn't explain much. But then I understood: they were famous for being famous. They were chosen (again) because similar people had chosen them (before). The lucky chosen few are on an escalator to the executive floor, without much regard to their talent or suitability to the job at hand.

I still cringe when I had to explain a VC who asked me assess an organization's technology for acquisition that their chief technologist was bad at his job. "But he's been doing this for 22 years!" came the astonished reply. All I could do was shrug. "He was trained by the guy who built this company!" Shrug again. The bottom line is that experience and certification are proxies and while they are sometimes adequate they are also often inadequate. Now there is something that can round out that certification and experience picture: talent assessment. Specifically, Pythia Cyber has assessments rooted in behavioral science that can add that piece of the puzzle. Is this gleaming candidate right for your organization's current opening for this specific job?

This is why I was so eager to be a part of Pythia Cyber's mission to help companies move away from certification and experience and toward talent. Because having been chosen once at a different time in a different place to do a different job doesn't say that much about how well you will do now, here at this. You have current needs and future liabilities. Focus on those. Ask us how.