ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Most leadership mistakes don’t look like mistakes in the moment.
They feel necessary.
In this conversation, Laurent Cohen reflects on what happens when hiring decisions speed up under pressure — and how intuition gets quietly overridden as momentum builds.
Drawing from 30+ years of building companies across Europe, the U.S., and Israel, he describes how judgment narrows, why teams stop pushing back, and how leaders end up fixing decisions that once felt completely right.
This episode isn’t about hiring frameworks.
It’s about what changes internally — before anything breaks.
Learn more about GetOblic
https://getoblic.com
If you’ve had to fix decisions that felt right at the time → https://joesteele.com
Chapters
00:00 — The decision that didn’t feel wrong (cold open)
00:11 — Where expensive decisions actually hide
00:40 — When hiring starts to speed up
02:01 — Why trust, not technology, becomes the constraint
03:00 — The shift toward problem solvers
04:11 — Confusing speed with clarity
05:18 — When the cost hasn’t shown up yet
05:57 — Measuring performance vs reading people
06:35 — How AI is changing the workforce
07:35 — The mistake of treating employees like family
08:48 — Why everything is one-on-one
09:34 — Daily signals and control
10:08 — Open access and no barriers
10:29 — Why intuition still drives hiring
12:26 — Reading body language over listening
13:23 — Knowing in the first 15 minutes
14:06 — When a hire looks right but isn’t
15:44 — What’s missing matters more than what’s said
16:08 — Getting locked into decisions
17:30 — Protecting time for your team
18:29 — Expanding across cultures
20:01 — Why in-office matters
20:33 — When to stop second guessing
22:00 — Building something that actually becomes a business
24:28 — The decisions that feel finished
