I did not grow up with fine ties, handmade shoes or driving shoes. I learned them. Nobody files this under skill. It reads as ease, and a room reads ease as capacity. That is how people get misjudged on both sides of the table.
At a board meeting where I presented, a trustee and I wore the same tie. Men wear ties to say where they stand. Neither of us mentioned it. It carried belonging, and it was not a brand I grew up with.
None of that was talent. It was training. I hired an executive coach to tell me how to react. I was learning a code nobody had told me existed, and it was ordinary to pay someone to teach it.
The old line says what got you here will not get you there. The hard part is that you cannot always read the shift. Nobody announces that the rules changed. You find out when something stops working, or you do not find out at all. I was an engineer arguing with people from very different backgrounds, in a form that was not mine. It worked because I could learn. I learned French because a client needed it. I have written code in about twenty languages.
For an investor, the lesson is where to look. Capacity is the first filter, and it is easy to test. The second is how fast someone learns a code they did not know existed, and a resume or a pitch will not show it. The gap that gets read as lack of capacity is often a missing curriculum, and a missing curriculum is cheap to teach. Ask a founder when the rules last changed on them, and what they did the next week.
Sources: Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won't Get You There (2007), for the line quoted. The tie, the coach, the French and the languages are the author's account and cannot be independently sourced.
This is the author's account and is not investment advice.