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I'm not saying that everything she touched turned to gold, but I am saying that she's one of the most high-profile executives in America. Princeton undergrad, H

I'm not saying that everything she touched turned to gold, but I am saying that she's one of the most high-profile executives in America. Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race. That's absolutely a stellar career that most people can only dream of.

simonsarris 6y ago
I think most people's idea of a stellar career is not a collection of titles but a collection of accomplishments.
smt88 6y ago
Leadership in management consulting is a negative mark on a resume, not a positive one.
- arbitrary_name 6y ago
  Ugh, this is a trite and worthless comment. You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. But thanks for sharing, I guess?
  - smt88 6y ago
    > You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped. I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver. They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue. I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore. Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire? > Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. What are they spectacularly good at, though? I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful. The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up. I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time". I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary. At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
    - adrian_mrd 6y ago
      100% agree with this based on my experiences. Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science. Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’. Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing. Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)? I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants. Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.
  - pm90 6y ago
    What kinds of businesses? Do you have specific experiences that inform your opinion here?
plankers 6y ago
>Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent. Meritocracy, my ass.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I think Meg Whitman is a pretty horrible CEO, not to mention she appears to treat people like shit. This article by Rob Enderle (from back in August mind you) gives a good overview of her poor leadership: https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicting-the-failure-of-quibi/ https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicti...
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  One does not necessarily beget the next. That is, there are plenty of folks who went to Princeton who didn’t make it to Harvard MBA. And many Harvard MBAs who dont become SVPs at major firms. And so on. In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches? I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for. Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Plenty of people work hard. Most of them do it for peanuts. I guarantee plenty of people at eBay worked harder than Whitman, for example; that place was an exploitative sweatshop in her era. I expect her maids worker harder than her, too. Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.
nevertoolate 6y ago
I see the pattern there. I’m from Europe but worked with US management. They came with previous titles, and with good understanding on the importance of self marketing even after hired. All their focus was on delivering the low hanging fruits after that only smoke&mirrors. Then after getting C level position they were fired, and started at another company at an elevated position. I’m not saying this is bad, but not something I would call a stellar career. It elevates people on a ladder but but not in a way Children dream of...
- ackbar03 6y ago
  Why was this downvoted? I feel this is very true. Having worked a few years in a corporate environment, suits and ties, especially higher up the management chain, are almost exclusively about self promotion, bullshitting, and smoke and mirrors. Throw them out into the wild and they wouldn't have a single idea of how to make a living or business except to get another job with their bs skills. Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
- wpietri 6y ago
  Exactly. And they're responding to the incentives in the system we've built. CEO tenure has dropped dramatically over the decades, while CEO compensation has skyrocketed. I can't find a measure elsewhere, but I'm sure sub-CEO executive position tenure is way shorter. So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.
sizzle 6y ago
This has privilege written all over it. It's evident when you study her upbringing and family connections.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> SVP at Bain Bain Capital, the PE raider made (in)famous thanks to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign? Sounds more like everything she touched turned to shit.
skinnymuch 6y ago
So much of that is pure elitism. Didn’t she spend the most money ever on her race? And lost? How Is that stellar? I’d be ashamed of that. Not the losing part. The trying to buy your way in part. otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade. You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.
cultus 6y ago
And people wonder why social mobility is so low in the US... Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.

simonsarris 6y ago

I think most people's idea of a stellar career is not a collection of titles but a collection of accomplishments.

smt88 6y ago

Leadership in management consulting is a negative mark on a resume, not a positive one.

arbitrary_name 6y ago
Ugh, this is a trite and worthless comment. You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. But thanks for sharing, I guess?
- smt88 6y ago
  > You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped. I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver. They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue. I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore. Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire? > Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. What are they spectacularly good at, though? I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful. The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up. I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time". I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary. At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
  - adrian_mrd 6y ago
    100% agree with this based on my experiences. Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science. Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’. Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing. Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)? I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants. Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.
- pm90 6y ago
  What kinds of businesses? Do you have specific experiences that inform your opinion here?

plankers 6y ago

>Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent. Meritocracy, my ass.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think Meg Whitman is a pretty horrible CEO, not to mention she appears to treat people like shit. This article by Rob Enderle (from back in August mind you) gives a good overview of her poor leadership: https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicting-the-failure-of-quibi/ https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicti...
Hnrobert42 6y ago
One does not necessarily beget the next. That is, there are plenty of folks who went to Princeton who didn’t make it to Harvard MBA. And many Harvard MBAs who dont become SVPs at major firms. And so on. In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches? I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for. Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Plenty of people work hard. Most of them do it for peanuts. I guarantee plenty of people at eBay worked harder than Whitman, for example; that place was an exploitative sweatshop in her era. I expect her maids worker harder than her, too. Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.

nevertoolate 6y ago

I see the pattern there. I’m from Europe but worked with US management. They came with previous titles, and with good understanding on the importance of self marketing even after hired. All their focus was on delivering the low hanging fruits after that only smoke&mirrors. Then after getting C level position they were fired, and started at another company at an elevated position. I’m not saying this is bad, but not something I would call a stellar career. It elevates people on a ladder but but not in a way Children dream of...

ackbar03 6y ago
Why was this downvoted? I feel this is very true. Having worked a few years in a corporate environment, suits and ties, especially higher up the management chain, are almost exclusively about self promotion, bullshitting, and smoke and mirrors. Throw them out into the wild and they wouldn't have a single idea of how to make a living or business except to get another job with their bs skills. Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
wpietri 6y ago
Exactly. And they're responding to the incentives in the system we've built. CEO tenure has dropped dramatically over the decades, while CEO compensation has skyrocketed. I can't find a measure elsewhere, but I'm sure sub-CEO executive position tenure is way shorter. So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.

sizzle 6y ago

This has privilege written all over it. It's evident when you study her upbringing and family connections.

AlexandrB 6y ago

> SVP at Bain Bain Capital, the PE raider made (in)famous thanks to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign? Sounds more like everything she touched turned to shit.

skinnymuch 6y ago

So much of that is pure elitism. Didn’t she spend the most money ever on her race? And lost? How Is that stellar? I’d be ashamed of that. Not the losing part. The trying to buy your way in part. otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade. You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.

cultus 6y ago

And people wonder why social mobility is so low in the US... Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.