Claudio Fernández-Aráoz

“What’s the magic number of candidates then? I worked with our firm’s research center in India on a massive analysis to study the relationship between how many people we had presented to our clients in thousands of executive searches all over the world and the “stick rate” of the one hired—that is, how many years he or she had stayed at the company, either in the original position or moving up to a more senior role. My expectation was that a larger pool of people interviewed would increase the stick rate, and that happened up to a point. But after three or four candidates, it rapidly declined, confirming that too many options generate suboptimal decisions. So three to four seems to be the right number, just as it is with the interviewers you involve in your key people decisions. But wait: Weren’t Kepler and Darwin out of this range with their eleven”
― Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, It's Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best

“Paul Nutt, a former Ohio State University professor who spent thirty years carefully analyzing 168 major corporate decisions, found that a full 71 percent were made after the executives responsible for them considered only a single alternative. Each choice was a binary one: whether or not to acquire that company, launch that product, enter that market, hire that person. And yet analysis showed that these “yes-or-no” scenarios led to poor outcomes 52 percent of”
― Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, It's Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best