It's the same short-termism you see in the sports world.
Every season starting around now, the top clubs in Europe will start to fire managers who aren't performing well. Despite the fact that a soccer team is something that has a bit of momentum and can't be changed all that quickly.
You then hire a new guy, and you have to pay a premium. For one, there are fewer people available because you're in a hurry. For another, any new guy will see there's a risk of getting canned, so he'll want more money to compensate. And finally, you'll have painted yourself into a corner because you need someone who is perceived to be better than the guy you just canned.
- The board members live off being board members. So just like analysts at banks, they herd together. Nobody is going to stick their head out on a candidate who is not like what they think everyone would want.
- There's an illusion of control. The idea that you can change outcomes predictably is a big problem. This guy will turn around sales. That guy is better with people. The reality is such judgements are quite blurry and likely to be spectral rather than binary. And a lot depends on environment.
- Desperation for action. If things are going badly, something must be done. This is something, so it must be done. (Yes Minister). This is another area where an understanding of statistics would help. Your team/company's losing streak is utterly natural. Replacing the guy at the helm when you get a streak is just likely to cause the next guy to get undeserved credit (which reinforces the cycle).
Short term thinking is often under-rated in business and people outside of business love to deride "quarterly thinking." Corporate cultures that manage to results and care about interim performance make sure their competitors never see the long term. Also these "quarterly profit driven companies" seem to be able to sustain long term investments like R&D--but R&D that's making progress each quarter.
This is the only natural endgame of "you can't manage what you don't measure" and metrics-based results-driven accountability. Particularly when those metrics are quarterly.
It's the same short-termism you see in the sports world.
Meh, if the ensuing thread below has taught me anything, it's that one person's short-termism is another person's rational, long-term solution. So couching the argument this way tells us nothing. It just gives us another lens through which we can see the world in a way that we're already predisposed.
> Desperation for action. If things are going badly, something must be done. This is something, so it must be done.
I see this in politics a lot. If things are going badly (another "mass shooting" happens), something must be done. Even if the solution is crap (ban "assault weapons") it is something, so it must be done.
Given that we cannot provide free or extremely inexpensive mental health care, or somehow get 340mil Americans not to behave like jackals and crass narcissists all the time, to actually treat each other with respect, dignity, and compassion, I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution. Sure, other guns may still be available but at least it's something.
> I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution. Sure, other guns may still be available but at least it's something.
This is exactly parent post's point. Something must be done, even if it is going to have little or no discernible effect on the problem.
Banning assault weapons won't stop the next lunatic from committing a mass shooting because:
A. You can easily kill dozens of people with handguns like the VT shooter did.
B. Millions of assault weapons are already in circulation. Trying to confiscate those weapons would likely cause violence.
Not to say that an assault weapons ban would not prevent some would-be shooters from getting a more powerful firearm, but it won't reduce the incidence of these shootings and you're still going to have a lot of people dead or injured if a shooter is forced to use a handgun.
And that's assuming that mass shootings are the most important problem to be solved in terms of gun violence. Mass shootings still make up something like 1 or 2 percent of all gun homicides in the US. If we really care about people being killed by gun violence, we would focus our efforts on the vast majority of gun crime that is committed by people with prior violent felony convictions with illegal firearms. We would also take serious steps towards ending the drug war and all of the violence associated with the black market for drugs.
Spending a ton of effort and political capital on getting a law passed that has very little effect on reducing gun homicides is silly. Because when a new AWB inevitably doesn't solve the problem, it's going to be all but impossible to pass another gun control law. If Hillary Clinton wins and forces through a new assault weapons ban she will have a tough time getting re-elected and Democrats will certainly lose Congress. Why not spend that political capital on something that will actually make a measurable difference.
Also keep in mind that gun violence is down dramatically[0]. So the problem isn't really that gun violence is increasing but rather public knowledge of it has.
Guns are often political focus because they are high profile in the media, but there are lots of "silent killers" that are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths per year that don't get high profile press coverage (medical malpractice, alcohol-related deaths, etc.).
Politicians aren't looking out for us, they are just trying to prop themselves up.
Disclaimer - never owned a gun, in fact never shot a proper one. The problem, among others, is definition what is assault rifle and what not. Military laughs at this definition coming from politicians, you can perform deadly assault with pencil, bow or a brick.
Is it ammo type? (ie 5.56 or .308 - but these are also common hunting calibers). Is it magazine capacity? - this can be cheated around super easily, especially if you prepare something nefarious. Full automats aren't sold anyway. Is it shape of the weapon? Now we left the land of facts and walking in the emotional wonderland. We can do better.
It's like some voices here in Switzerland stating military home-held guns should be banned because some people commit suicide with them. Yeah, let's forget the core suicidal issue and remove the tool, that will surely stop them, right?
Guns don't kill people (and don't get sentenced for that), people pull triggers and kill other people. But that's much harder to fix, so let's find some easy scapegoat, right?
'Assault rifle' is a clearly defined concept: it refers to a select-fire rifle chambered for an intermediate cartridge (the ur-examples being 7.62x39 in the first AKs and 5.56x45 in the M16) and fed from a detachable box magazine.
'Assault weapon' is a term with no military definition, but which might have a legal definition, depending on jurisdiction. In my home state, there's no such thing as an 'assault weapon,' because we have no statute defining such a thing.
Select-fire rifles are almost impossible to come by due to the '86 ban, but intermediate cartridges and detachable box magazines are common.
An earnest legislator might try saying that an assault weapon is one that's fed by a detachable box magazine and chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Then one of their constituents will see me at the range with my FAL, which is fed from a detachable box magazine, but chambered for a full-power cartridge. Why isn't that rifle - which based on its appearance is clearly the same sort of beast as an AR or AK - banned?
So the definition expands, based on cosmetic features, or naming specific models. Both of those solutions leave loopholes by their very nature; bans on pistol grips and barrel shrouds and folding stocks and bayonet lugs are solved by manufacturing functionally-identical rifles missing those features.
So perhaps we say that any rifle fed from a detachable box magazine is an assault weapon. Then the manufacturer makes a rifle with a fixed magazine, loaded with stripper clips. So we say that any rifle with a magazine capacity greater than some arbitrary number is an assault weapon - and I'll sell you a 'magazine repair kit' to increase that capacity.
I don't favor legislation restricting the purchase of firearms, but I certainly see how frustrating it must be for those who do. They earnestly want to eliminate this one evil totem of violence while leaving your grandpa in possession of his deer rifle (well, most of 'em), and we always dress up things that are allowed back into those same totems.
Come on, you don't go to a mall with a pencil, a brick or a bow and kill 50+ people. The point of assault weapons ownership laws is to introduce friction, so getting a weapon that can go through kevlar is hard, and if you get caught, hell rains upon you.
The line must be set at some point, and of course people are going to tip toe around it, but that's not the point. And don't go Switzerland, if everybody in the US had proper training in how to use and (more important) store their weapons, and the government had an exhaustive control of every shell... Well, it would be different.
> Come on, you don't go to a mall with a pencil, a brick or a bow and kill 50+ people.
Neither do folks with 'assault weapons.' More people are killed with knives than with all long guns; approximately as many are killed with fists & feet[1]. 'Assault weapons' bans are just feel-good measures.
What about the mass murder weapon you drive to the mall in? We gonna ban cars the next time someone plows through the waiting line for the new shiny at 100 MPH??
> Come on, you don't go to a mall with a pencil, a brick or a bow and kill 50+ people
Has this ever happened in the history of any 1st world country? The closest we've ever come is the Orlando shooting at 49, but... the events with the highest body counts are vehicular mass murder or bombs, not guns (9/11, Nice France, Oklahoma bombing, etc.)
> ... you can perform deadly assault with pencil, bow or a brick.
I'm not saying we shouldn't ban certain guns, but I don't think people realize that if someone is hellbent on killing, they'll use a hatchet or a machete if they can't get a gun. We'll have fewer deaths, but much, much nastier ones.
We don't have to use our imagination about what other weapons people might use to commit terror - Bombs and vehicles are already popular, and no less deadly.
> Yeah, let's forget the core suicidal issue and remove the tool, that will surely stop them, right?
Making it more difficult to commit suicide reduces the incidence of suicide. People who experience suicidal impulses but recover without having had the opportunity to attempt suicide (or who recover from a failed suicide attempt) are likely to seek help with either preventing the impulse returning or addressing the underlying issue that made them vulnerable.
> Guns don't kill people (and don't get sentenced for that), people pull triggers and kill other people. But that's much harder to fix, so let's find some easy scapegoat, right?
> Other studies, he said, have suggested attacks with semiautomatic guns – particularly those having large magazines – “result in more shots fired, persons hit and wounds inflicted than do attacks with other guns and magazines.” Another study of handgun attacks in Jersey City during the 1990s, he said, “estimated that incidents involving more than 10 shots fired accounted for between 4 and 5 percent of the total gunshot victims in the sample.”
> Koper, Jan. 14: So, using that as a very tentative guide, that’s high enough to suggest that eliminating or greatly reducing crimes with these magazines could produce a small reduction in shootings, likely something less than 5 percent. Now we should note that effects of this magnitude could be hard to ever measure in any very definitive way, but they nonetheless could have nontrivial, notable benefits for society. Consider, for example, at our current level of our gun violence, achieving a 1 percent reduction in fatal and non-fatal criminal shootings would prevent approximately 650 shootings annually … And, of course having these sorts of guns, and particularly magazines, less accessible to offenders could make it more difficult for them to commit the sorts of mass shootings that we’ve seen in recent years.”
It doesn't quite work that way. There is a reasonably consistent trend among studies that somewhere between 3% and 5% fewer gun deaths occur if magazines are smaller than 10 rounds. That is also more than the margin of error for such studies.
Similarly, even a 2% reduction saves ~1,300 people a year.
So pretending its a mere scapegoat is...stretching quite a bit. Now you can argue a thousand or two thousand people dying is an acceptable cost to maintaining the status quo but that isn't the argument you tried to make.
Smaller magazines provide a margin of safety of several seconds which you might actually be able to get clear and accuracy is frequently low, so that first shot after reloading is likely to miss.
Read up on the pros and cons of infantry rifles chambered for a full power or intermediate rifle cartridge. The gist of it is that in any given contact a very, very very small minority of shots hit their target therefore infantry should be equipped with something that fires the smallest, lightest cartridge that does the job so that they can carry more of them.
Magazine capacity reductions are easy to circumvent (a $30 stamp set can put a "pre-ban" date on your magazines) and most of the people doing mag dumps are either not subject to those laws (cops) or have no intention of following them in the first place (criminals).
The other problem is someone dressed and equipped like a fully armed infantryman showing up in a mall...gets noticed. You can't stealthily carry a ton of cartridges AND have them easily accessible. You'll have to put them in a backpack or the like, changing the equation.
Yes, if they play things perfectly, you will lose every time. The reality is, most of these guys are pretty average and make numerous mistakes. The guys who play it out perfectly never get caught regardless of the law. That isn't an argument we should make murder legal.
This is exactly what the GP is referring to. "We have to do something! This thing won't actually solve the problem but it lets me feel better because we did something, so let's do it! Pretty close to the definition of a crap solution.
It won't stop any one occurence from happening, but it likely will mitigate the damage on that occurence. It's hard to argue it's not at least a step in the right direction. But I agree it won't solve the problem at heart.
Not trying to get into an off-topic political discussion, but the AWB I'm familiar with is almost entirely cosmetic in nature and would not have prevented any of the tragedies that are often used to prop it up. There are many effective things that could be done to lessen gun violence without needlessly restricting something that has no connection to that violence. Barrel shrouds are cosmetic but they make something an assault weapon, as does a pistol grip on a shotgun (which makes it less accurate for 99.9% of users).
Comprehensive, mandatory background checks? Of course.
"This gun looks scary and is therefore dangerous?" Nonsense.
If it where purely cosmetic people would not be fighting it. Instead, there is opposition specifically because it is a meaningful, though small change.
A purely cosmetic change would be requiring all guns to be panted orange.
PS: Most people don't have tools or mechanical know how, making 'simple' changes difficult.
> If it where purely cosmetic people would not be fighting it.
Simply not true. People fought the AWB because it was largely cosmetic (not entirely). Even those in support of the bill have said many of the banned items were cosmetic.
> Soon after its passage in 1994, the gun industry made a mockery of the federal assault weapons ban, manufacturing 'post-ban' assault weapons with only slight, cosmetic differences from their banned counterparts.
From the Violence Policy Center, a pro-gun control group.
If a manufacturer can make strictly cosmetic changes to a weapon and have it be compliant, it's kind of hard to argue there was "meaningful change." That's not a loophole, that's banning a cosmetic feature and a manufacturer getting rid of that cosmetic feature.
An assault weapons ban is something that everyone agrees with, unless they know something about guns and have seen what the ban actually looks like. Once you see the list that is banned vs the list that is not banned, you realize that it usually isn't useful (at best) and is actively problematic for some people (at worst).
Its the same problem as we have with a lot of laws in the US. It sounds like a good idea, but ultimately addresses the wrong problem.
Legislators have to take what they can get -- it's the nature of politics because you have two groups who disagree, going back and forth until they reach some solution the other guy hates, but will accept.
Creating a department that has full authority to regulate a matter is the best way to get in effective laws. But then the laws get too effective and lobbyists have to then push to have their power reduced.
>we cannot provide free or extremely inexpensive mental health care, or somehow get 340mil Americans not to behave like jackals and crass narcissists all the time, to actually treat each other with respect, dignity, and compassion
Not with that attitude you can't!
>I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution.
Sometimes you can't address a problem with an easy band-aid, and pushing as hard as you can on the difficult part of the problem is the only effective option.
Why ban assault weapons (which are hardly ever used in shootings) instead of handguns (which are by far the most common type of gun used in shootings)?
The "assault weapon" ban was a stupid compromise; the UK and Australia responded to mass shootings with near-total gun bans and thereby ended the phenomenon.
America is simply not serious about gun violence, because it has a substantial pro-violence constituency. The acquittal of the Malheur occupiers is just the latest sign of that.
The UK didn't really have mass shooting incidents all that frequently even before their bans. The only two I can think of are Hungerford and Dunblane, which were spaced out over nine years. Additionally, the vast majority of the incidents on that page are not mass shootings but instead the political "four people shot" == mass shooting. The two largest "mass shootings" on that list were acts of terrorism, as we saw in France terrorists don't even need firearms to kill scores of people.
> The UK didn't really have mass shooting incidents all that frequently even before their bans.
There have been major restrictions on handgun use in the UK since 1968, well before Hungerford and Dunblane.
> but instead the political "four people shot" == mass shooting.
Are you pretending to be innumerate just to make a point? Or are you expecting me to believe you honestly can't subtract the two "acts of terrorism", just count the ones with more than five people killed, and still see that it's massively more than five times the UK number?
CEOs have long been fall guys. They go into the job with an expectation that if anything goes wrong, they will need to fall on their own sword to absorb accountability. That's why termination packages are stupidly generous... leaving the job is often part of doing the job.
The real news should be Why CEOs Aren't Being Fired Fast Enough
When bad CEOs do get fired, you often hear 'finally, what took them so long to rid of that guy' and not 'aww, guy just got there, the board should have given him a longer chance'[1].
The upswing in stock price following a forced CEO turnover may be seen as corroborating this sentiment.
Why are poorly performing CEOs not being replaced quicker when corporate boards with a fiduciary responsibility have more than enough evidence he/she is not the right person for the job?...
[1] Ron Johnson is the only recent example I can remember where I heard maybe a couple people say that felt fast.
I don't think we should see those things as mutually exclusive. I might combine the arguments as "CEOs should be fired for personal performance, not corporate or economic upheavals."
Stumpf left Wells Fargo over a debacle he neither created nor directly managed. Certainly, over something less visible and attributable than Cordiner at G.E. There's no particular reason to think that the new CEO is more qualified to reform incentive structures and security precautions than he is, so it was just a changing of the guard to show that something was being done.
Meanwhile someone like Ballmer was ousted about a decade after the industry had decided it was necessary. I knew college students who swore they wouldn't work at Microsoft until Ballmer left, and that was years before he finally did. Even if you feel he did a good job, it's pretty undeniable that his presence was toxic to Microsoft's reputation and ability to recruit. And yet he only left when Microsoft's problems became undeniable and 'new blood' was needed to buoy the share price.
To me, the most consistent narrative is that boards fire CEOs when a problem becomes so public that they need someone to hold responsible. That means both ignoring incompetence if things are running uneventfully, and ignoring competence (or reasonable ignorance) when a scandal comes through.
> Stumpf left Wells Fargo over a debacle he neither created nor directly managed.
Cite needed. Right now it's completely not clear, except that widespread, clearly illegal activity happenend on his watch.
I think it's ridiculous to compare Stumpf with Ballmer who simply wasn't as good as he could have been - he increased profits during his tenure, and to my knowledge, did not preside over shady activity (in contrast to Bill Gates who was happy to "knife the baby" of his competitors).
This seems to be a return to accountability from the excesses of the oughts (the 2000s).
It's guys like Ken Lay (Enron) and Rich McGinn (Lucent), not to mention John Stumpf (Wells Fargo) who set up the expectation that executives should be freewheeling, and that living high was the best way to signal to shareholders that the company was in good shape.
The days when the CEO drove himself to work in a Buick and showed up in a rumpled suit just off the red-eye at customer offices when there were problems delivering value seemed to have faded away.
Anybody pulling down a seven-figure salary ought to be wise enough to salt a lot of it away. Baseball players and bigshot executives are both out there on the firing line. When they stop delivering their expected value, they should expect to be cut. Reversion to the mean makes this more likely than not for superstars.
It's entirely positive that shareholders are paying attention to one of the biggest expense items - exec compensation - in their companies' budgets.
It would help if shareholders were better at understanding long-term strategies. A good CEO (Jobs, Apple; Musk, Tesla; Welch, GE) is capable of persuading them.
You sound like you're joking but it's true. There are a shockingly small number of people who are really capable of being a CEO of a large (or even medium sized company) and doing it well. It's an insanely hard job.
And two of the biggest tech CEOs (Sundar Pichai of Google & Satya Nadella of Microsoft) are immigrants.
The people that parrot this line are usually CEO's themselves, or people angling for the job at some point. I am amused about how CEOs take credit for successes but failures are always driven by external factors out of their control.
The reality is that CEOs are as good as their underlings, as they do all the real work and advise the CEO. For that matter, CEOs probably shouldn't be pulling 100x earning multiples compared to their 'normally' paid employees.
People with your line of thinking are usually IC's who discount how difficult leadership is. How do you affect change without having to do everything yourself? That's a valuable skill.
Most people come in to do defined jobs. Most initiatives that are innovative or risky come from below the CEO without CEO's influence. CEO's have little input on day-to-day operations of big companies. Add to it that many companies minimizing both management and CEO pay are among highest performers. Several models include Publix, Costco, Whole Foods, and I recently found Semler.
Semler is a good example showing the opposite model works in difficult, high-innovation sectors in the worst economy possible with least management possible. Just has to be set up right. On other end, Toyota Production System, Publix, and Whole Foods strategies draw most innovation out of people lower in hierarchy with excellent results. Heavily-managed, hierarchical companies are among the least innovative normally just acquiring companies for it.
So, CEO's should be payed way, way less than they are right now with most senior managers just eliminated in favor of interacting, small teams or divisions. Much of the administrative stuff could similarly be outsourced to lean organizations focusing on that stuff.
"Do this or you're fired" will typically get those below you to produce the change you desire. Not sure how you can put that much value on a skill inherit to a hierarchical organization.
If the organization was flat, then I would concede your point that affecting change without any seniority would be difficult and worth extra compensation. A true leader would need to be persuasive, knowledgeable and visionary.
What you describe as "leadership" is people doing their job.
"Do this or you're fired" will typically get those below you to produce the change you desire.
LOL. If this were true it would be so much easier. But talented employees, who can easily get another job across the street, are more likely to laugh at you then do what you want if you talk to them like that.
(We've gotten a bit off topic this deep in the thread. At this point we're really just talking about general management skills which really isn't a big thing for a CEO of any reasonably sized company. That being said....)
Robert: Sorry I can't work late this week. It's my kid's birthday tomorrow.
Back in the real world it's not unemployment that you're gonna worry about. It's how much severance you're going to pay him. Somewhere between 1 and 3 months. Which he'll use to take a nice vacation and then easily go get another job whenever he's ready.
And you'll be down a talented employee that's hard to replace.
Good leaders can effect change without resorting to the "do this or you're fired" line. If your manager kept using that line on you, I suspect you'd go find a place that didn't work that way.
> There are a shockingly small number of people who are really capable of being a CEO of a large (or even medium sized company) and doing it well.
How much of this is due to genetics and prenatal environment and how much to education and life experiences? If the former dominates there isn't much we can do for now, but if it's the latter, there's gotta be a massive market for CEO-schools, both public and private.
Personally, I suspect that the limiting factor is social capital--most CEOs get hired because they're known among people connected to the board, and it's hard to get known. I'm not sure what the solution in this case is though, except maybe more residential desegregation by class and ethnicity.
Don't confuse being known with being trusted. One is a prerequisite for the other, but they are not the same thing. It's not so much who you know as it is who trusts you.
That's certainly true. I wonder if there is a way to increase the number of people who are trustworthy and seen as trustworthy in a given social circle?
Going solely off the data I have[0] that seems to be untrue. Do you have some other sources or is this more "common knowledge" from the corporate sector?
Nonsense. It is much more demanding, involving and decisive to be CEO of a small company. In a large company, a CEO is merely a spokesperson for his advisors.
I think the large compensation helps the CEO act on what he/she feels is in the best interest of the company. When you make enough in one year to retire, you can make decisions with a lot more courage.
I've never worked for a company where the majority of people there didn't know who the CEO was and what he looked like (by chance the CEOs at the companies I've worked for have all been male). This ranges from the $4MM/year place with a dozen employees to the mid-ten figure public healthcare company.
What do you work? In most companies most employees know the CEO. Not as a person, but as a symbol. He writes emails to the team. He says which products for which markets should be developed. And he hires/fires people, or at least the ones that do the hiring/firing for him.
That's what mine do at my current company, he's fine. (Startup around 80 people now).
In my past 3 companies (from 100 to 100 000), I have never heard of the CEO once, don't know any name, not sure there is one, if there is one he might as well not exist.
It sure ain't a person and ain't a symbol.
For some people, it's actually a demoralizing symbol of "A useless employee making xM$ for nothing. He shouldn't be there."
It's opposite in my company. It's a Fortune 100 company where almost nobody knows the CEO since we never see him, rarely hear from him, and don't care since he has little impact. The workers, from offices to production, run our company with senior management just taking credit for or higher pay from all that. CEO showed up once for some red carpet treatment, speeches, and food but that's it.
If you are really producing the effort that makes the company successful I'm sure you could easily get a job somewhere else that'll pay you better and give you better support from up top...
Most companies in the world now are going through a big consolidation process on a scale unheard of in the past, in preparation for when things go very bad in the near future due to several accumulating factors.
This means is that companies are increasingly designing themselves to be sold; to be valued higher, so that when they get bought by the biggies, the 'Boys Club' (Seniors, Chiefs, etc.) get more money in the end.
This means companies are acting more for the quick sell rather than having any kind of long-term plan for the future, and this means that a C.E.O.'s world view and opinion and plan for the company quickly become outdated and left behind, in favour for short-term company valuation increases.
Also, one way of increasing your company's value is changing C.E.O.'s more often, since it shows your company is "pro-active" and "progressive", and gets you in the news a lot.
The funny thing is that the growth or decline of a big company rarely depends on the performance of the CEO who gets paid by millions at most cases. It mostly depends on the current status of the market.
They cited several academic studies on shrinking tenure and increased likelihood of CEOs being let go for performance. The New Yorker isn't one to use footnotes.
Every season starting around now, the top clubs in Europe will start to fire managers who aren't performing well. Despite the fact that a soccer team is something that has a bit of momentum and can't be changed all that quickly.
You then hire a new guy, and you have to pay a premium. For one, there are fewer people available because you're in a hurry. For another, any new guy will see there's a risk of getting canned, so he'll want more money to compensate. And finally, you'll have painted yourself into a corner because you need someone who is perceived to be better than the guy you just canned.
- The board members live off being board members. So just like analysts at banks, they herd together. Nobody is going to stick their head out on a candidate who is not like what they think everyone would want.
- There's an illusion of control. The idea that you can change outcomes predictably is a big problem. This guy will turn around sales. That guy is better with people. The reality is such judgements are quite blurry and likely to be spectral rather than binary. And a lot depends on environment.
- Desperation for action. If things are going badly, something must be done. This is something, so it must be done. (Yes Minister). This is another area where an understanding of statistics would help. Your team/company's losing streak is utterly natural. Replacing the guy at the helm when you get a streak is just likely to cause the next guy to get undeserved credit (which reinforces the cycle).