dumbest-in-the-room

dumbest-in-the-room is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ace3000chao/book2startup. It costs 107 tokens per session (2,644 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A leadership practice for building a team whose members have deeper expertise than the leader in their areas. The leader focuses more on asking questions, sharing information, and giving people authority to decide.

In plain words
What is it for?
Recognising when a leader is doing too much personally, encouraging stronger hiring, and helping teams make decisions without constant executive approval.
Why use it?
It reduces the leader’s role as the only source of answers, which can slow decisions and stop the team from contributing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Recognising when a leader is doing too much personally, encouraging stronger hiring, and helping teams make decisions without constant executive approval.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ace3000chao/book2startup/dumbest-in-the-room
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ace3000chao/book2startup --skill dumbest-in-the-room
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ace3000chao/book2startup

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for dumbest-in-the-room

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ace3000chao/book2startup/dumbest-in-the-room/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ace3000chao/book2startup/dumbest-in-the-room)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ace3000chao/book2startup/dumbest-in-the-room"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ace3000chao/book2startup/dumbest-in-the-room/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for dumbest-in-the-room

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ace3000chao/book2startup/dumbest-in-the-room"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ace3000chao/book2startup/dumbest-in-the-room.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,644 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00107 $0.02644
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.01322
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00529
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00264

Measured 11d ago against content hash 8639c553a6c6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dumbest-in-the-room scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

ScalingUp-skills/dumbest-in-the-room/SKILL.md · 145 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 145 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dumbest in the Room(成为团队最笨的人)

R — 原文 (Reading)

"Senior leaders know they have succeeded in building an organization that can scale when they are the dumbest people in the room."

— Verne Harnish, Scaling Up, Chapter 1

高管们知道,当自己成为团队中最笨的人时,组织已经成功建立了能够持续扩张(Scale)的机制。这意味着你已经招募到比你更专业的人才,建立了充分授权的文化和信息流通机制。如果你总是扮演"给出答案的人",组织会陷入沉默,创新停止,真正的 Scaling 就永远不会发生。


I — 方法论骨架 (Interpretation)

"Dumbest in the Room" 是一种领导力成熟的标志,而非个人能力的退步:

  1. Scaling的本质是复制而非事必躬亲 — 企业的天花板是CEO的时间上限;唯有将能力复制给团队,天花板才能抬高。
  2. 招募A类人才的前提是愿意被超越 — 一个自信的高管会主动招募比自己更专业的人,而不是找听话的B/C类人才来维持优越感。
  3. CEO不再是答案的持有者,而是问题的提出者 — 你的价值在于提出正确的问题,让团队给出答案,而非相反。
  4. 沉默是组织最大的敌人 — 如果团队开会时只有CEO在说话,那不是团队,是一群观众。授权的前提是让团队敢于发言和担责。
  5. 信息必须下沉到一线 — CEO掌握最多信息的时代必须结束。组织要Scale,一线员工必须拥有做决定的权力和信息。
  6. 容忍"聪明的错误" — 授权不等于放任。如果团队犯的是"聪明的错误",这是成长的代价,值得容忍;只有"无知的错误"(缺乏基本判断)才需要介入。
  7. 授权是CEO最重要的习惯 — Harnish在书中将此作为Rockefeller Habits的核心之一:不亲力亲为,用系统代替个人英雄主义。

A1 — 书中的应用 (Past Application)

案例 1: 某科技公司CEO的"答案瘾"

  • 问题: 公司CTO出身的CEO习惯于在技术问题上给出标准答案,导致技术团队在会议中不再主动提案,所有决策都等CEO拍板。
  • 方法论的使用: Harnish指出,这种模式在30人以内有效,超过30人后成为组织扩张的硬约束——CEO的时间成为唯一瓶颈。
  • 结论: CEO需要"戒掉答案",主动在会议中要求团队先给出方案,只提问不评分,延迟给出自己的判断。
  • 结果: 3个月后,技术团队开始自主提出方案,CEO发现自己被邀请参会而不是主持会议。

案例 2: 某零售连锁的区域扩张失败

  • 问题: 创始人过度依赖自己的行业经验,每个新城市的选址和选品都亲自决策,导致扩张速度受限于创始人精力。
  • 方法论的使用: Harnish分析:当组织扩张到一定规模,创始人的个人经验反而成为障碍——他无法同时出现在10个城市做决策。
  • 结论: 必须建立标准化的决策流程和培训体系,让区域负责人有能力独立做80%的决策,只将20%上报。
  • 结果: 该公司引入区域经理分级授权体系,扩张速度从每年2个城市提升到每年8个城市,且区域存活率从60%提升到85%。

案例 3: 某创业团队的"侏儒症"

  • 问题: 创始团队有3名强个体,产出质量极高,但团队规模始终在6-8人徘徊,产品迭代速度反而随着人数增加而下降。
  • 方法论的使用: 诊断发现:创始人"不放心"将关键模块交给新人,导致核心决策集中在他一人身上,形成隐形的决策单点故障。
  • 结论: 将核心模块切分为3个独立领域,每个领域指定明确的负责人(哪怕是初级员工),创始人只负责协调和问问题。
  • 结果: 6个月后,团队扩张到15人,产品上线频率提高2倍,且核心模块的质量未下降。

A2 — 触发场景 (Future Trigger) ★

用户会在什么情境下需要这个 skill?

  1. 抱怨团队不够强、不够信任 — CEO说"找不到能放手让他们干的人",或"招来的人都不行,还得我上"。
  2. 会议变成独角戏 — 团队汇报时CEO不断打断、纠正、追加指令,导致会议效率低下且没人再主动发言。
  3. 个人工作量远超团队总和 — 高管发现自己每天工作12-14小时,团队却无事可做或等待他的审批。
  4. 扩张决策犹豫不决 — 每当讨论要不要扩团队、进入新市场,CEO担心"现在的人管不过来"。
  5. 组织扩张后业绩反而下滑 — 规模扩大但人均产出下降,典型的"规模不经济"现象。

Read the full file on GitHub · 145 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 145 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A 8639c553a6c6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dumbest-in-the-room is a skill published in the GitHub repository ace3000chao/book2startup (80 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 2,644 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

delegation-and-empowerment

Develops the daily practice of effective delegation, accountability diagnosis, and team empowerment. Covers assessing which tasks require personal attention, clarifying scope and context for delegated work, allowing productive struggle, recognising and correcting micromanagement, and leading through influence rather…

fatihguner/foreman · 99 tokens

inclusive-leadership

Provides daily practices for building genuinely inclusive teams through language audits, bias interruption, equitable hiring, cross-cultural sensitivity, and systemic fairness. Use when team composition lacks diversity, when DEI initiatives face backlash, when women or underrepresented groups stall in advancement…

fatihguner/foreman · 75 tokens

psychological-safety-practice

Translates psychological safety theory into daily leader behaviours -- the specific words, reactions, and micro-actions that build or destroy a team's willingness to speak up. Covers misconceptions, responding to mistakes, inviting honest feedback, modelling healthy conflict, addressing bad behaviour immediately, and…

fatihguner/foreman · 113 tokens

psychological-safety

Assesses and builds team psychological safety using Edmondson's framework and Clark's four developmental stages: inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety. Identifies leadership behaviours that build or erode the shared belief that interpersonal risk-taking is safe. Use when team members withhold…

fatihguner/foreman · 88 tokens

team-culture-and-dynamics

Provides daily practices for reading team energy, shaping culture deliberately, writing unwritten rules, diagnosing accountability gaps, balancing personality types, and building high-performing teams through social connection. Use when a team feels stuck or stale, when collaboration derails despite good intentions…

fatihguner/foreman · 89 tokens

organisational-culture

Audits organizational culture using Schein's three-level model: visible artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions. Diagnoses gaps between stated values and actual behaviour to reveal the invisible beliefs driving organizational dynamics. Use when experiencing culture dilution during rapid hiring…

fatihguner/foreman · 78 tokens