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Comment by eru

4 months ago

No. Not necessarily.

There's plenty of people described as 'quiet and polite, but firm' or some similar variations.

What founders / CEOs can you name described by those qualities?

  • I'm not sure you need to restrict yourself to these. You can also look at eg political leaders.

    Lee Kuan Yew is one example that comes to mind immediately. Warren Buffett might be a good example from the world of business.

    (Your favourite search engine or chatbot is probably more than happy to give you a steady stream of other examples.)

    • I don't know, maybe he wouldn't raise his voice, but I can't imagine it would be fun to be a subordinate of LKY at the moment he decided you were wasting his time.

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    • Warren Buffet is a very carefully crafted “aww shucks” persona. He’s spent megabucks inventing it and keeping it safe. And I lose the argument because I cannot find the article from a decade ago that really dug into it. Either SEO has vanished it or he has it removed.

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  • Digital's Ken Olsen is probably one of the most relevant examples. Though it probably helped that Olsen was largely working with the grain at DEC, building digital playsets which engineers themselves loved, rather than constantly forcing them to adopt a non-technical consumer's perspective.