Searching for A Unicorn - Chief of Staff to Support the CEO of a Growing Tech Company in San Francisco

I recently republished a White Paper on the role of the Chief of Staff in the private sector.  What prompted this republication was a search I am conducting to fill a newly created COS role for a rapidly growing San Francisco based company.

If you have alread served as a COS or aspire to the role, please consider applying.  This CEO is a visionary who is willing to mold someone fairly early in their career.

Duties of the Chief of Staff:

• Serve as a strategic resource in support of the CEO
• Carry out specific projects that will be assigned by the CEO
• Serve as an extra set of eyes and ears in meetings - inside and ouside the company
• Ensure that benchmarks and deadlines are reached
• Serve as a soundingboard for the CEO as decisions are arrived at
• Optimize communication between the CEO and direct reports

Requirements:

• A track record of superior achievement and promotion
• Excellent communication skills - verbal and written
• Project management skills and experience
• Strategic thinking
• Creativity
• Emotional intelligence
• Flexibility
• Coachability
• Diplomacy skills
• Leading through influence and consensus
• Integrity
• A sense of adventure
• Basic knowledge of the tech start-up world, through experience or robust reading, for example:
• "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries
• "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel
• "The Hard Thing about the Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz
• Position is based in San Francisco. The company will pay to move the right candidate who is not currently living in the Bay area.

The Unicorn Factor:

• Here are some of the things the CEO said in setting the parameters for the COS search:
• "In hiring executives, I look for fascinating and interesting people. Please don't send me any boring MBAs!"
• "Candidates do not necessarily have to come from the tech world, but they should have basic knowledge of the tech startup ecosystem. If a candidate did not know who Ben Horowitz is, that would be a concern."
• "In building my team, I look for individuals with diverse backgrounds."

So, if in reading about this position you see yourself as a viable candidate, and can tell an interesting life story and career story, send a resume to:

achase47@gmail.com

Include a brief cover letter highlighting why you think you may be a good for this COS role.

Please pass this job description along to anyone in your network who may be interested and qualified.

Thanks.

Al Chase

"Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson - "The Origins of Our Discontents"

 

Isabel Wilkerson established herself as a writer of significant influence with the publication of her landmark work, "The Warmth of Other Suns." This seminal work chronicles the Great Migration of post-Civil War blacks northward to the industrial centers of Chicago, Detroit, New York, et al. In her most recent book, she examines racism in the light of the concept of caste. The subtitle of "Caste" is "The Origin of Our Discontents."

Wilkerson examines three caste systems: India, Nazi Germany, and the United States. Linking these three societies together is not something I would have been able to do on my own, with the author leading the way toward new levels of awareness with her insights and anecdotes. I had chills when I read that when the Nazis came to power in Germany, they wondered how to cement their cultural views of racial purity into a well synchronized legal system They turned to the Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War South as their template:

"By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States 'was not just a country with racism,' Whitman, the Yale legal scholar wrote, 'it was the leading racial jurisdiction - so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.' The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not." (p.81)

The author does an excellent job of making her case for racism being a form of caste by sharing the Eight Pillars of Caste that can be found in the three societies examined in this book.

Pillar Number One: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature

Pilar Number Two: Heritability

Pillar Number Three: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating

Pillar Number Four: Purity versus Pollution

Pillar Number Five: Occupational Hierarchy

Pillar Number Six: Dehumanization and Stigma

Pillar Number Seven: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control

Pillar Number Eight: Inherent Superiority versus  Inherent Inferiority

The author spends the remaining 200 plus pages offering specific examples of how these eight pillars have undergirded the particular caste systems in India, Nazi Germany, and the U.S. In a very moving Epilogue, Wilkerson shares how Albert Einstein served as a bridge between the caste systems of Germany and the U.S. After fleeing the antisemitism of Nazi German's caste system, Einstein settled in Princeton, New Jersey. He was shocked to find that he had not completely escaped the depredations of caste:

"In America, Einstein was astonished to discover that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods, but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had fled"

'The worst disease is the treatment of the Negro,' he wrote in 1946. . . . He could 'hardly believe that a reasonable man can cling so tenaciously to such prejudice.'"(p. 378)

When Einstein and his wife learned that acclaimed opera singer Marian Anderson was denied lodging at the local Nassau Inn, they welcomed her to stay in their home, beginning a friendship that endured until Einstein's death. His awareness of the parallel between the oppression of Jews in Germany and blacks in America awakened in him a strong sense of responsibility to act.

"And so he did. He co-chaired a committee to end lynching. He joined the NAACP. He spoke out on behalf of civil rights activists, lent his fame to their causes." (p. 379)

The parallel to our day is striking. As the Black Lives Matter movement has grown in the wake of countless examples of death and injury from police brutality, like Einstein in post WWII America, leading lights in academia, sports, the arts, and politics are using the bully pulpits afforded them by their fame to speak and act against the invidious aspects of racism that persist to our day.

Enjoy!

Al