Socratic Interrogation as Selection Filter

"He went on to study at Fordham University, where his professors were Jesuits and whose teaching approach was based on the restless, open-ended questioning style of Socrates. It was this style of inquiry, aimed at rooting out answers to intractable topics from a collection of people with different points of view and experiences that, more than the details of his studies, influenced Don throughout his life. It made him doubt everything – particularly conventional thinking – and was the source of some of his favorite, terse ways of ferreting out answers. ‘Why?’ ‘Who cares?’ ‘Who needs it?’ ‘Why does it matter?’, ‘What does it do?’, and ‘So what?’ were the plain verbal thrusts he came to employ to gauge whether prices could be raised, a product made sense, a new market should be attacked or the significance of a milestone."

"Unknown to me at the time was Don’s habit of counting the number of times a candidate used ‘I’ as opposed to ‘we.’ Candidates who favored the first person were dead on departure."

"By the time I met him, Don had spent decades refining his interviewing technique. He was not one to put young candidates at ease. He conducted his interrogations at a small, round, wooden table in the corner of his large office at 3000 Sand Hill Road where the morning sun blinded anyone sitting opposite him and the view looked towards California’s coastal range."