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Fellow Corporate White Collar Folks: Do you actually believe anyone is qualified to run organizations of the size of Fortune 500 companies?

Basically title. As I’ve advanced in my career (Commercial Insurance; product management) it seems to me not only are many of the folks in decision making roles not qualified, result of nepotism, silver spoon kids (one, all or some combo), but even having ‘worked my way up’ I don’t think I’m qualified for the half the decisions I’m asked to make. The way things go in our ‘data driven decision making’ world is that a question comes down “what’s driving xyz?!” My leaders ask me, I ask my analysts to pull together data. They give me an overview, and despite the data being unclear, poor/questionably reliable info, or just plain showing there’s no central cause the world is just complex and bad things happen, I have to make a decision/plan for how to address and shoot it up the chain for approval. Everyone feels better bc we’re taking action, but…


Basically title. As I’ve advanced in my career (Commercial Insurance; product management) it seems to me not only are many of the folks in decision making roles not qualified, result of nepotism, silver spoon kids (one, all or some combo), but even having ‘worked my way up’ I don’t think I’m qualified for the half the decisions I’m asked to make.

The way things go in our ‘data driven decision making’ world is that a question comes down “what’s driving xyz?!”

My leaders ask me, I ask my analysts to pull together data. They give me an overview, and despite the data being unclear, poor/questionably reliable info, or just plain showing there’s no central cause the world is just complex and bad things happen, I have to make a decision/plan for how to address and shoot it up the chain for approval.

Everyone feels better bc we’re taking action, but the reality is we’re spending resources on a gamble.

And when I think of the complexity of even just weather events, the changing climate, and the billions of property value at stake… like nobody truly has a handle on it all. Or even close. And the filtered, neutered version of data that gets to the top, that CEOs make decisions on… yikes it’s terrifying.

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