The Recipe for Success

You have two hires to make. One is a head of sales. You know the number you need, you have a search firm on it, and you'll pay the firm a third of her first-year package to find her. The other doesn't have a title. It's the person who, when the head of sales brings in the big contract, asks whether the company can deliver it, and whether it should. Call the role the advisor. There's no search for one and no line in the budget for one, and if the role gets filled, it gets filled by accident: an old boss who still takes your calls, a board member who happens to ask good questions, a friend from another industry. We staff for strength, but rarely for wisdom.

The head of sales gets hired in a quarter. Yours is missing, and the cost shows up as the contract you won and shouldn't have: delivered late, priced wrong, and carried for three years by the people who could have said so and weren't asked. Success means the contract delivered and the company still standing a year later, and that takes both hires.

Sometimes the advisor is already in the building: a CFO or a general counsel who was hired for the close or the contracts and turned out, over years, to be the person everyone checks with first. Nobody hired him for that. It came with him, and the company found out later.

We pay for strength

The money goes the same way. Sportico's analysts added up 37 segments of the sports business, from ticket sales to sneakers to youth leagues, and put global revenue at $2.65 trillion for 2023, which lands sports among the 10 largest industries on earth; Two Circles counted the top 500 sports properties alone at $170 billion in 2024. Most of it follows the athlete, not the coach. Consulting and coaching sell the nearest thing to wisdom, at a fraction of that. Nobody drives a child to practice for it, and nobody drafts for it.

The same bias runs through how you hire. The hires that get attention are the strength hires: the head of sales who can bring the number, the COO who can scale the operation. Each one has a job description, a search firm, an interview loop and a first-quarter target. The wisdom hires are harder to see because most of them aren't hires. The advisor who shows up once a quarter, and the board member who asks the question nobody else did. Most companies have the first kind and not the second, because one shows up in the standard hiring process and the other doesn't.

Why strength is easier to buy

There's a reason the search firm exists for one and not the other. Strength is more accessible, fungible, transactable, and commodifiable. It goes in a job description, an afternoon of interviews and a quarterly number, and if it's wrong there's a market to replace it from.

Wisdom has none of that. It's hard to describe and slow to measure, because what it produces is mostly the contract that didn't go wrong, and nobody gets a bonus for that. We outsource wisdom rather than bake it in. The company is fine for years, and then there's a lawsuit or a failed acquisition, and somebody calls a consultant, and for six weeks wisdom has a budget. Buying wisdom is typically an event-driven behavior. Then the event passes and the company goes back to having no advisor.

There is no demand for wisdom when there are no felt constraints. A company that's growing, well funded and winning doesn't feel its limits, and wisdom is about operating within constraints. Our intuition tells us that the strong must possess some wisdom, otherwise, how else did they become so strong? Sometimes it's true, and the strong are the last to find out when it isn't, because the mighty are vulnerable in ways they cannot see. Charlie Munger: "It's the strong swimmers who drown."

What wisdom adds to strength

A company with no head of sales and a very thoughtful advisor is a book club. Wisdom works on strength like a blacksmith works on steel. The blacksmith has no job if there is no steel. The advisor decides with the head of sales which contracts to chase and which one would sink the company if she won it.

A wise man is full of strength, and a man of knowledge enhances his might, for by wise guidance you can wage your war, and in abundance of counselors there is victory.

The verse puts the strength on the wise man's side and says where it comes from, counsel and a lot of it, and counselors are the hire nobody makes.

The A-Team had B. A. Baracus, who could go through any wall, and Hannibal Smith, who could see the trap on the other side of it, and the show ran five seasons on the pair. Lions are strong. Foxes are clever. It's the combination of strength and wisdom that makes one formidable.

Strength alone, or wisdom alone

A company that has one without the other fails in a way you can recognize, and the two failures don't look alike.

Wisdom alone is theory, but no traction. Picture a founder who can diagnose his own company's situation better than anyone who works for him. The analysis is right. The team sits through the long meeting, nods, and goes back to doing roughly what it was doing, because nothing in the meeting had the force to move anyone. After enough of those, the people who bring in the revenue stop waiting for his meetings.

Strength alone is ready, fire, aim. Shoot yourself in the foot. Picture the opposite founder. Decisions are fast. The first 18 months feel like progress, and then the cost starts coming in on installment: the wrong walls were broken and two customer relationships are gone for good. The strength was real. Nobody was there to say which wall.

You can tell which one you're short on from what you complain about in private after a bad quarter. If it's that the team didn't move fast enough and nobody else sees what you see, you have the analysis and not the force. If it's that every decision you made fast has come back slow and the operators have stopped asking before they act, you have the force and not the counsel.

How to put wisdom on the payroll

The recipe isn't complicated: strength, plus wisdom, in the same company, at the same time, on purpose. What's rare is hiring the advisor before the lawsuit.

Putting wisdom on the payroll means paying for it the way you already pay for strength: before you need it. A board seat given to the person who'll argue with the plan. A standing monthly call with somebody outside the company who has watched your kind of decision go wrong and owns none of this one. A partner with a real vote on the deal, agreed before there's a deal to vote on. And the roles you're already hiring for, hired for it too. In a CFO search you ask whether he can close the books and raise the debt, rarely whether you'd take a hard question from him, and by year three that's what you most need from him. We don't hire for wisdom in those roles first, and then we're surprised when the person who has it is the one we didn't plan on. None of those costs a third of a first-year package. When the head of sales walks in with the big contract, she has somebody to think it through with, and so do you: how it gets delivered, what it should cost, which parts of it you'd rather not sign. The contract she'd have chased anyway comes back worth more.

Ecclesiastes 9:14 to 16 has a story about this. A small city with few men in it is besieged by a great king, who builds siegeworks against the walls. By every visible measure the city is finished. Inside it there's a poor man nobody has paid much attention to, and by his wisdom he delivers the city. Then, 9:15: "Yet no one remembered that poor man." (Ecclesiastes 9:15, ESV) The next verse says wisdom is better than might, and that the poor man's wisdom is despised and his words go unheard. It reads as a sad story about the wise man, and it is. I mean who wants to be poor, alone, not remembered, and not listened to? But read it from the city's side. The city had him the whole time. It had never put him on the payroll, and it forgot him the day after because nothing in its budget had a line for what he'd done. The next king who comes will find the same walls and no poor man.

You'll have your head of sales by the end of the quarter, and nothing in your process will remind you about the advisor. Nothing in your competitors' processes will either. Wisdom and strength together is the rarest of unicorns, because nobody puts a line in the budget for the siege that ended. One of the two hires is probably already in your building, and you could find out this week by asking him what he thinks of the contract.