> It suggests a unique and amusing approach to hiring management: executives should find people who truly value the goals of the executive, hire them as managers, and (perhaps via intentional lack of oversight!) give them leeway to let their subconscious values impact their work, thus making their minds legible to mind-reading employees.
"Hire people who share your values/goals and let them get on with things" is hardly a novel insight. The trouble is that aligning them is hard.
>”Hire people who share your values/goals and let them get on with things" is hardly a novel insight.
Right, because it’s not the same thing. If you hear “hire people who share your values/goals and let them get on with things” and implement it, you’ll likely end up focusing on hiring developers/engineers and giving them resources, rather than hiring managers and giving them fiefdoms to run according to their whims. You’ll also likely end up hiring people whose true values match your true values and whose stated goals match your stated goals, but this argues that you want people whose true values match your stated goals, and you should ignore their stated goals. Despite sounding similar I think it is really quite different.
(Arguably, this is WHY we find “alignment” so hard: we are constantly aligning their values with our values and their goals with our goals, and we are even achieving that alignment some of the time, and yet things still don’t work - instead we should be trying to align their values with our goals, because this is the kind of alignment that produces results)
"Hire people who share your values/goals and let them get on with things" is hardly a novel insight. The trouble is that aligning them is hard.