Roger Martin: Massive Founder Delusion Is Essential for Economic Innovation
Roger Martin · #97 Roger Martin: Forward Thinking · Nov 24, 2020 · at 1:11:22
Roger Martin explains James March's organizational theory on how founder overconfidence drives economic progress to Shane Parrish.
0:00 / 0:38exact quote · 38.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The economy is underpinned by delusion in, in, in that we do know that nine out of 10 kind of startups expire with a hundred percent of the resources kind of wasted. If anybody Thought those were the odds that they personally were facing. They wouldn't do it, but they, everybody is deluded, self deluded into thinking they're going to be the one, not the nine. and because of that, 10 people do try. And the economy gets the one success, but it's only because it's only because there's massive amounts of delusion.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Roger Martin
Martin: Modern US capital markets harm American competitiveness
“I think in 2020, now America has got a capital market that is a detriment to American competitiveness because it is causing companies to behave in ways that aren't good for the company, its employees, America over overall.”
Roger Martin: The era of widely held public corporations will end
“I think we're going to look back, twenty-fifty, we'll look back on this period, 19, 40 ish, 35, 40 ish to say 20, 20, 25 or 30 as this insane period where we thought the widely held publicly traded corporation was the optimal form. And we're going to look back…”
Martin: Public Company Boards Disciplining Management Is an Absolute Fantasy
“The idea that, that a board will discipline management is, is just an absolute fantasy. And that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets, the equity markets, and the widely held publicly traded companie…”
Roger Martin: Rating agency analysts are inherently worse at assessing bonds than market traders
“The only reason they would be in that chair is that they're not particularly good at rating bonds, right? Because if they had a skillset that made them good at rating bonds, what chair would they be sitting in? ... They'd be either sitting in a chair at Goldma…”
Roger Martin: Business dramatically and vastly overuses the scientific method
“We dramatically, vastly overuse science.”
Roger Martin: Creative domains require creating causes, not analyzing past data
“Analyze data, collect as much data, analyze it rigorously to determine causes of effects in this other part of the world. Imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made. And he said, the job of human beings in that …”