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The moment someone suggests that their advantage is being smarter than everyone else (or that everyone over 40 is somehow stupid), I look for ways to short them

The moment someone suggests that their advantage is being smarter than everyone else (or that everyone over 40 is somehow stupid), I look for ways to short them. I know a handful of F500 execs, and they are formidable. Sure, they may turn to IT to set up their new "iPhone BlackBerry", but they have tools in their belt to compete with that most valley entrepreneurs don't even know exist. They were the best, brightest and hardest-working of the previous generation. They are us, with more life experience and better networks. Underestimate them at your own peril. They might be dinosaurs, but who wants to jump in the ring with a velociraptor?

xapata 10y ago
Saying a large company has trouble innovating isn't necessarily a criticism of the executives. Large bureaucracies are cumbersome, certainly more so on average than a smaller company. Let me offer the analogy of a big, old software project. It is far more difficult to make a major refactor of some 20-year-old, millions-of-lines system than a script you wrote yesterday. That's not saying the old project was incompetent. It could have been very elegant, the best engineering of its day.
- DelaneyM 10y ago
  You're roughly describing the Innovator's Dilemma, which is an entirely different beast (and definitely not what the author of the linked article is referencing.)
  - xapata 10y ago
    No, I'm not describing the Innovator's Dilemma. That's essentially the problem of getting stuck in a local maxima and the need to take a temporary loss to find a bigger hill, so to speak. I was instead trying to describe the troubles of maintaining an old system. They're intricate and all fixes must be hot-patched. Now, if you could just reboot... For example, suppose you're at a large enterprise that has a silly expense policy involving taping physical receipts to a standard size paper, one receipt per page, then mailing the packet to India, where the pages get scanned and sent to the accounting department, which meticulously compares the receipts against the Excel spreadsheet you filled out and submitted via VBA macros (yes, this is a true story). How easy would that be to change? Compare that experience with working at a 20-person company and asking the accountant if she doesn't mind using Expensify. Saying that a big company is hard to change isn't necessarily an accusation that the CEO is myopic. As for what McClure meant by saying public companies will be disrupted... I'm not really sure, since he also contradicted himself saying that they'll purchase their potential disruptors. Perhaps he meant that large enterprises which do not acquire new companies will be out-competed by those who do. That's somewhat of an interesting assertion, but I don't know of any large enterprise that has only an M&A team or an R&D team. They all have both.
    - DelaneyM 10y ago
      Ok, to put it differently, the Innovator's Dilemma was the interpretation of your description I could most easily agree with. It's also valid, because that local maxima can also exist in a software project where maintenance has a greater short-term payoff than refactoring. In that case I'm sticking to my guns and just disagreeing with you. Many companies are horribly operationally inefficient in many ways, but they often don't care if it's not actively costing them significant market share. The moment that expense report process starts impacting the bottom line you can bet they'll be on the cutting edge of resolving it.
      - xapata 10y ago
        > Many companies are horribly operationally inefficient in many ways, but they often don't care if it's not actively costing them significant market share. My experience suggests otherwise. Big organizations are bureaucracies carved up into little fiefdoms, each little lord trying to maximize something different. The boss of the receipt scanners wants to increase headcount, not reduce costs. As a management consultant, I encountered that situation time and again -- an executive choosing an outcome worse for the company, knowing it'd be better for him or herself, or simply out of pride, laziness, or malice. There's a reason why Dilbert rings true for so many office workers. A new CEO can try to clean things up, but they can't fire all the middle management simultaneously, so the ship turns very slowly. Going back to the software metaphor, it's not the issue of short-term vs long-term thinking on patch vs refactor, but the problem that the system is live and must be highly available during maintenance.
        dragonwriter 10y ago
        > A new CEO can try to clean things up, but they can't fire all the middle management simultaneously, so the ship turns very slowly. Firing all middle management doesn't help: humans are self-interested. What a CEO needs to do is align incentives for middle management with the interests of the firm, so that self-interested middle managers aren't microoptimizing their domains on criteria that don't serve the interests of the company.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hifumi 10y ago
The moment someone suggest that their advantage is being older than someone else (that everyone under 30 is somehow stupid), I look for companies that will disrupt them. Only a handful of formidable execs are not stuck in a bygone age, but are still scowling at these tech millennials pulling in millions of revenue because they used unorthodox business methods. The previous generation needs to catch up. Adapt or begin dying at your own peril.
- mahranch 10y ago
  Except that the older generation doesn't deny the fact that Millennials are smart, clever or innovative. That's never been the problem. On the contrary, they work hard to exploit those traits and take advantage. On the other hand, millennials undervalue or even completely ignore life experience (aka, wisdom). They incorrectly believe that intelligence is wisdom, or that intelligence can overcome a lack of wisdom. That's far from true as people will learn the hard way. Wisdom and life experience is something that only comes with age, and is why you always hear the phrase "respect your elders". You're being asked to respect wisdom itself. Let me ask HN a question; when you were 20, did you think you were smarter/wiser than when you were 10? How about when you were 25? Did you think you were wiser than your 15 year-old self? Those of us that hit or broke 30 think we are miles and miles smarter/wiser than our 20 year old selves in exactly the same way we were smarter/wiser than our 10 year old selves when we were 20. That increase in wisdom/life experience does not stop when you hit some magic age. Sure, you may stop growing maturity wise, but you never stop learning. At least I haven't yet, and I'm approaching 40. I look back at my 30 year old self and laugh because I was a complete moron who thought he was starting to finally figure some things out. Nope. Not even close. Still not close yet but I finally understand that you will never have anything figured out. Millennials take that life experience for granted because they don't have enough yet to even know what it is.

xapata 10y ago

Saying a large company has trouble innovating isn't necessarily a criticism of the executives. Large bureaucracies are cumbersome, certainly more so on average than a smaller company. Let me offer the analogy of a big, old software project. It is far more difficult to make a major refactor of some 20-year-old, millions-of-lines system than a script you wrote yesterday. That's not saying the old project was incompetent. It could have been very elegant, the best engineering of its day.

DelaneyM 10y ago
You're roughly describing the Innovator's Dilemma, which is an entirely different beast (and definitely not what the author of the linked article is referencing.)
- xapata 10y ago
  No, I'm not describing the Innovator's Dilemma. That's essentially the problem of getting stuck in a local maxima and the need to take a temporary loss to find a bigger hill, so to speak. I was instead trying to describe the troubles of maintaining an old system. They're intricate and all fixes must be hot-patched. Now, if you could just reboot... For example, suppose you're at a large enterprise that has a silly expense policy involving taping physical receipts to a standard size paper, one receipt per page, then mailing the packet to India, where the pages get scanned and sent to the accounting department, which meticulously compares the receipts against the Excel spreadsheet you filled out and submitted via VBA macros (yes, this is a true story). How easy would that be to change? Compare that experience with working at a 20-person company and asking the accountant if she doesn't mind using Expensify. Saying that a big company is hard to change isn't necessarily an accusation that the CEO is myopic. As for what McClure meant by saying public companies will be disrupted... I'm not really sure, since he also contradicted himself saying that they'll purchase their potential disruptors. Perhaps he meant that large enterprises which do not acquire new companies will be out-competed by those who do. That's somewhat of an interesting assertion, but I don't know of any large enterprise that has only an M&A team or an R&D team. They all have both.
  - DelaneyM 10y ago
    Ok, to put it differently, the Innovator's Dilemma was the interpretation of your description I could most easily agree with. It's also valid, because that local maxima can also exist in a software project where maintenance has a greater short-term payoff than refactoring. In that case I'm sticking to my guns and just disagreeing with you. Many companies are horribly operationally inefficient in many ways, but they often don't care if it's not actively costing them significant market share. The moment that expense report process starts impacting the bottom line you can bet they'll be on the cutting edge of resolving it.
    - xapata 10y ago
      > Many companies are horribly operationally inefficient in many ways, but they often don't care if it's not actively costing them significant market share. My experience suggests otherwise. Big organizations are bureaucracies carved up into little fiefdoms, each little lord trying to maximize something different. The boss of the receipt scanners wants to increase headcount, not reduce costs. As a management consultant, I encountered that situation time and again -- an executive choosing an outcome worse for the company, knowing it'd be better for him or herself, or simply out of pride, laziness, or malice. There's a reason why Dilbert rings true for so many office workers. A new CEO can try to clean things up, but they can't fire all the middle management simultaneously, so the ship turns very slowly. Going back to the software metaphor, it's not the issue of short-term vs long-term thinking on patch vs refactor, but the problem that the system is live and must be highly available during maintenance.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > A new CEO can try to clean things up, but they can't fire all the middle management simultaneously, so the ship turns very slowly. Firing all middle management doesn't help: humans are self-interested. What a CEO needs to do is align incentives for middle management with the interests of the firm, so that self-interested middle managers aren't microoptimizing their domains on criteria that don't serve the interests of the company.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hifumi 10y ago

The moment someone suggest that their advantage is being older than someone else (that everyone under 30 is somehow stupid), I look for companies that will disrupt them. Only a handful of formidable execs are not stuck in a bygone age, but are still scowling at these tech millennials pulling in millions of revenue because they used unorthodox business methods. The previous generation needs to catch up. Adapt or begin dying at your own peril.

mahranch 10y ago
Except that the older generation doesn't deny the fact that Millennials are smart, clever or innovative. That's never been the problem. On the contrary, they work hard to exploit those traits and take advantage. On the other hand, millennials undervalue or even completely ignore life experience (aka, wisdom). They incorrectly believe that intelligence is wisdom, or that intelligence can overcome a lack of wisdom. That's far from true as people will learn the hard way. Wisdom and life experience is something that only comes with age, and is why you always hear the phrase "respect your elders". You're being asked to respect wisdom itself. Let me ask HN a question; when you were 20, did you think you were smarter/wiser than when you were 10? How about when you were 25? Did you think you were wiser than your 15 year-old self? Those of us that hit or broke 30 think we are miles and miles smarter/wiser than our 20 year old selves in exactly the same way we were smarter/wiser than our 10 year old selves when we were 20. That increase in wisdom/life experience does not stop when you hit some magic age. Sure, you may stop growing maturity wise, but you never stop learning. At least I haven't yet, and I'm approaching 40. I look back at my 30 year old self and laugh because I was a complete moron who thought he was starting to finally figure some things out. Nope. Not even close. Still not close yet but I finally understand that you will never have anything figured out. Millennials take that life experience for granted because they don't have enough yet to even know what it is.