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Why Does Firing a Coach Usually Improve the Next Season?

Jared Diamond says coaches get fired after a losing season, and CEOs get fired when a company has a poor year and low returns. Fire a CEO after a losing season and the new CEO usually has a better season the next year. 70% of the variance in a sports outcome is due to factors that are random with respect to the CEO.

He compares the firing to dice. Throw a one, call the thrower lousy, and fire that person. Five out of six times the next thrower does better than one, because the other faces are two, three, four, five, and six. In sports, the new coach usually has a better record for the same random reasons. Jared Diamond says his university, UCLA, now has an athletic department $150 million in debt because UCLA fired every basketball coach since John Wooden and had to buy out each contract for $5 million, $10 million, or $15 million. Fire a CEO and the next CEO is likely to do better for random reasons, as with dice.

The dice pattern is why business school professors have gotten lots of their insights by analyzing sports.

Grokipedia·Jared Diamond·John Wooden

Transcript

What Makes Great Leaders & How to Live an Extraordinary Life | Dr. Jared Diamond ·

Huberman Lab

More from this episode

  1. How Did Hitler Shape Jared Diamond's Life?Jared Diamond says his life and his wife's life were formed under the shadow of Hitler.
  2. Why Did Jared Diamond Save a Student From Expulsion?Jared Diamond talked his department into keeping his second graduate student after the student did poorly on an exam.
  3. Why Do Powerful Leaders Almost Never Step Down?Jared Diamond looked at 22 outstanding political leaders from World War II onward and found that only two stepped down voluntarily.
  4. Why Has Jared Diamond Made Lists Since Age Three?Jared Diamond has made lists ever since age three.
  5. Why Did a Medical Dean Fund New Guinea Birds?Jared Diamond says the longest serving medical school dean in the United States gave him five thousand dollars every year to keep studying New Guinea birds…
  6. What Kept Jared Diamond in Miserable New Guinea?Jared Diamond says life in New Guinea is physically miserable most of the time, and still fascinating enough to stay.
  7. Why Does Jared Diamond Find Birds Easiest to Study?Jared Diamond says birds inform ornithologists about everything. Birds are the easiest of all animals to observe and to understand.
  8. How Do Vervet Monkey Grunts Act Like Words?Jared Diamond says vervet monkey grunts function as words. Each grunt names a different danger, and the other monkeys answer with a matching move.
  9. Why Did Jared Diamond Allow One Student's Own Project?Jared Diamond negotiated with his graduate students and postdocs so each project interested both him and the student.
  10. Why Did Jared Diamond Start Counting Time at 89?Jared Diamond says a sharp sense of time left has not always been part of his life. Turning 80 was not a shock.
  11. Do Bezos and Zuckerberg Have a Life Philosophy?Jared Diamond says he is not aware of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg having a philosophy of life beyond their business.
  12. What Career Rule Does Jared Diamond Live by?Jared Diamond says perhaps the main advice is to make sure you do something you enjoy, because that is what most people do not do.

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