On taste

Taste is what people call judgement once they have stopped being able to explain it. This sounds dismissive. It is not — it is admiring. The senior people I respect most are the ones whose calls I cannot reconstruct from first principles, but which turn out to be right at a rate that is hard to attribute to luck.

Taste is the residue of ten thousand small judgements you no longer have to make consciously.

You cannot hire for taste. You can hire for the conditions under which it develops: repetition, accountability, and the absence of people who will make decisions for you.