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Comment by kromokromo

20 hours ago

How does this work though. At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.

Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.

At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.

  • It's manufactured incompetence. You can see it a lot in companies who use a lot of subcontractors.

> At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.

There's always the chance one could have ridden fake-it-till-you-make-it long enough for the engineers to solve the underlying issues...

  • It is one thing to fake and misrepresent the completeness of a video game, but it is entirely another to provide false or unverified medical results to patients.

In virtually every company there are questions you intuitively know that your managers don't necessarily want to know the answers to (or at least, they only want to know the answers to them if you have a solution), usually it's something relatively trivial like minor infractions of corporate rules.

There are some leaders who are extremely good at convincing you about the importance of belief in a particular thing to the point where you avoid even thinking up those questions - if they are ever cornered (and they rarely allow it to get to that point) they will wriggle endlessly rather than responding to a line of inquiry that bursts the collective bubble.

Do they know? It's hard to argue about their internal motivations.