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Why are some companies able to accelerate and continue to grow despite supply chain failures, rising inflation, and political instability? Are they just lucky?
After analyzing 30,000 companies and millions of leaders over a 15-year period, business model expert Christopher Skinner believes he has the answer. It doesn’t involve capital, a brilliant business plan, or genius marketing.
“It’s because of who they hire,” he said.
In analyzing companies and their employees, Skinner considers how the most successful companies recruit ace teams whose members resemble the “PayPal Mafia,” the dozen or so entrepreneurs who have worked at PayPal (Elon Musk , Reed Hoffman and Peter Thiel, etc.) later founded large companies.
“It turns out it’s not random,” said Skinner, founder and managing partner of Stealth Dog Labs in New Orleans, which builds organizations using disruptive innovation. “It requires purpose,” he said.
Analyze linguistic data to identify personality types
But how do companies identify and hire “good people”?
When Skinner began his career, he knew he needed a method that used the psychology of language to determine the mindset of individuals and teams. By studying the vast amounts of speech and text found online, it may be possible to identify typical personality types and even the personalities of entire organizations.
For example, opportunists are known for being good at sales, while results-oriented individuals can make excellent leaders. In contrast, some personalities—self-saboteurs, narcissists, and martyrs—can become stumbling blocks for a company.
The problem he faced, however, was how to collect and evaluate the millions of words and phrases—linguistic jigsaw pieces that he could piece together into portraits of personality types.
“I built a crawler,” Skinner said.
Specifically, Skinner, the designer and architect of search engine algorithms, built his first search engine focused on psychology in 2010. “Really, it’s no different than what Google does,” he said. “It’s just a collection of words.”
Skinner has become one of the few people to study language density on a large scale, and his research has been used by companies such as Google, Vodafone, Bose, Target, Oreck, United Airlines, and SpiderOak Internet Security. In studying the data, he identified words and phrases that were often repeated by organizations and individuals, eliminating the personal element. He then divided the findings into basic personality types.
For example, a results-driven mindset likes words like “complete,” “acquired,” and “safe,” as well as future tense words. This type of person gets to the point quickly, is highly results-oriented, and does not get distracted. “This is the proper role of leadership,” Skinner said.
Sales master opportunists use hedge words such as “because,” “therefore,” “if,” and “then.” Skinner points out that analyzing language use is a delicate art, so his findings may not be obvious to others.
“I didn’t invent the psychology of language,” says Skinner, who holds a degree in abstract mathematics and three patents for technical automation. “But over the past hundred years, psychologists have learned that if you use too many of a particular word, it means something.”
Traits of successful leaders
Successful leaders are often results-driven, but they are also systems thinkers, with a mindset that values relationships and interactions among teams and networks. Examples of systems thinkers include Jamie Dimon; Steve Jobs; Whitney Wolfe Herd, co-founder and current chairman of online dating platform Bumble; author Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code , which aims to close the gender gap in tech.
“Systems thinkers can float around and understand very obscure things,” Skinner said. “People who reach this level combine things and understand how they relate to each other, a process that usually doesn’t make sense to most of us. If you have enough of that and combine it with being results-oriented If you combine the thinking, then this is very profitable for everyone. These are win-win types. They figured out how to make it all work.”
Skinner absorbed vast amounts of linguistic data, sometimes observing similarities between individuals. He noted that FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried and biotech blood testing entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, both convicted of fraud, had similar patterns of language density.
These two men, and others like them (“The list is long,” Skinner said) used fewer emotion words and “more cognitive processing words like ‘think,'” he said . They also tend to use words like “maybe” and “navigate.”
Skinner used a variety of methods of assessing personality, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Five-Factor Model (often called the “Big Five”), but he preferred the work of William R. Torbert . “Tolbert’s description of people is very simple,” he said. “Once you understand Torbert’s concept of mindset, you have a good idea of what kind of person you’re talking to.”
Skinner recommends that employers conduct personality tests on potential employees and comply with laws that prevent invasions of privacy.
Every company has a personnel operating system
Skinner said the company’s “people operating system” ultimately determines continued success. He came up with the phrase after observing the ecosystem of employees, suppliers and customers surrounding his company. “All these people should be working towards a common goal and they are more or less in sync,” he said.
Skinner gave the example of AutoZone, which sells car replacement parts. The company has nimbly adapted to changing markets and technologies over its 45-year history. In 1999, it entered the Fortune 500 list for the first time, and in 2021, Forbes ranked it 39th among 750 multinational companies and institutions on the World’s Best Employers list. AutoZone has more than 7,000 stores in the United States and other countries.
“I have no doubt that the CEO and the people around him are outstanding,” Skinner said. “He had a perfect operating system.”
Linking personality types to luxury real estate sales
Filling the right vacancies with the right people is the best way to develop such an operating system. For example, sales-minded opportunists are good at making things happen. “They found a way to win,” Skinner said. “And they’re very good at responding to emergencies. But it’s a very self-directed position. Frankly, their purpose, actually their subconscious purpose, is themselves.” They perform best when they stick to the sale.
Putting personality types in the wrong place can create friction within individuals and companies. For example, an opportunist may be good at selling traditional real estate but not at brokering elite deals. “They don’t live much longer. Do they exist? Yes, they are there. But if they were more customer-centric, how many deals could they close?”
In luxury real estate, where clients often have unlimited options, “potential buyers will walk away if they feel like they don’t have a team player,” Skinner adds. In contrast, top brokers tend to be results-driven systems thinkers. Empathy also helps understand a rich, multifaceted mindset.
Like the PayPal Mafia, “once you get the right team together, it takes off,” Skinner said. “It’s because of this team that PayPal became a force. Their joining together wasn’t accidental; it was accidental. It was purposeful. Before you could use PayPal, you needed to go to a bank. They created an industry.”
Results-driven leaders drive company success
Companies that lose too many results-oriented leaders often suffer. After the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, JPMorgan Chase was in trouble. “If you look at the top 1,000 leaders in a company, they’ve lost a lot of results-oriented leaders,” Skinner said. “It was a bad time for the banking industry and they are paying the price.”
Around 2013, Chase, the largest U.S. bank, “started recruiting results-oriented leaders again, and it paid off,” Skinner said.
Skinner considers Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon to be “one of the most results-driven systems thinkers running companies today. I have been analyzing his texts (speeches and other communications) for two decades.” . His mental abilities have matured. He’s as skilled as Jeff Bezos. He’s in a very, very rare club, and there’s no question that he’s surrounded by capable people.”
Other companies won’t rebound the way Chase did. Skinner cited the example of global technology solutions company Unisys. “Unisys’ stock price has been declining for the past 20 years,” he said. “But what’s interesting is that almost every year they do worse. They’re not alone. When you look at how they think, how they use language, it’s not results-driven. They tend to be a very disciplined group of good people. experts. But they don’t solve the customer’s problem.”
Disciplined experts tend to be resistant to change, have limited flexibility and are slow to make decisions, Skinner said. He added that some businesses do well with the help of disciplined experts because they have no incentive to innovate.
“But I don’t know how many companies won’t be in trouble in the next 10 years,” Skinner said. “If you feel that decisions are not being made quickly enough and the company has limited flexibility and is resistant to change, bringing in results-driven systems thinkers may be the answer.”
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