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I'll say the unpopular. From a business stand point - it makes sense. You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They'r

I'll say the unpopular. From a business stand point - it makes sense. You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores. When you start from scratch it's "easy" to create such an environment. You don't have random people going off and doing random things. Everyone is pointed, focused and hungry to get to the same goal. If you don't, you run the risk of becoming lazy or hamstrung by politics and red-tape of people who want their rubber stamp to "show something for it". That's Intel vs ARM at the moment. It's a fine balance. Obviously you don't want "yes men" but you want people who are willing to move as a unit. I also agree it's terrible. Whole units are ousted because there's a new guy on top. People that gave sometimes decades to the company. All I'm trying to say is - it's not so clear cut.

krageon 6y ago
It's unpopular because you're doing harm by perpetuating this behaviour. Lots of things make sense when viewed from the right context (f.e. genocide as a "solution" to world hunger), but that doesn't tell you anything about why it's seen as undesirable behaviour.
legerdemain 6y ago
> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores. During a planning meeting, you decide that Bob should build new feature X. Bob says yes, and then never does it. Secretly, Bob only takes requests from Bill, because Bill hired him into the company and was also his fraternity brother. You go on vacation and temporarily hand off your support responsibilities to your counterpart on another team. When you return, you find that your counterpart has jammed a half-finished feature into your code, making it unrecognizable. Your skip lead leaves for another company. Within weeks, half of your division leaves to follow him. Your support burden triples and no one is left to tell you how undocumented legacy functionality was supposed to work. If startups worked like corporate executives, there would never be a successful one. The entire MO of the executive class is zero attention span, zero focus, and zero memory.
- irjustin 6y ago
  Sorry, I believe you switched the directionality of my analogy because I agree with you. Corp execs should run like startups. Trusting, fast moving units effective in its execution towards a common goal. When a corp exec replaces a whole layer or unit with their own guys it's because they need to move like a startup does. Or it could just be cronyism - that's always possible too, but I think we're trying to find a positive/useful reason in this thread.
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    Or it could just be cronyism It's this. In my experience (line manager), when a new C-level is hired, within two years, they've usually replaced 50% of the VP/directors that sit below them in the org. That's far too much churn for it to be because those particular VP/directors are brilliant - by extension, that would mean the outgoing VP/directors were not - except many of them went to work for the recently departed C-level! They can't all be brilliant and they can't all be useless, so we're largely left with cronyism.
    - irjustin 6y ago
      To me, the difference between cronyism vs trusted VPs is simply whether they were successful or not in the long run. And you're right, you lose _lots_ of brilliant talent when the helm changes hands. I think what's helpful is to imagine you are that exec going in to a new position of a large org, 26,000 people, say Chief Marketing Officer. A few know you, but there are a lot of new faces who now have to call you boss and answer to your directions whether they agree or not. You now have to convince each major head that what you're doing is the right thing. How long does it take to build that level of trust? Typically years and a few large projects won. Some of those heads have been around for a long time and don't like the way you do things. If you want to be effective, you don't have much time to figure out who is toxic, who is simply lazy, who resists your leadership. Some resist openly, but most behind closed doors by dragging things, sowing discord. etc etc. You clearly can't keep everyone - it doesn't do any good. At a certain level trust and speed make up for brilliance. Just like hard work/grit can close a gap of genius. Again, I agree with you - lots of good guys are lost. So many times at the detriment of the company, but that means the outgoing leader picked the wrong successor. Separately I enjoy this topic. Its our human condition laid bare.
yxhuvud 6y ago
> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder You also need a team that actually knows the business.
- syshum 6y ago
  Its seems today, at least at the C-Level, the "actual business" just a interchangeable widget... Business is the business all businesses are in, and if you manage one business you can manage all businesses... So say the MBA
  - julienb_sea 6y ago
    Not really... I mean sure you can make an argument about the mechanics of a business being the same. But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? That is a non-trivial problem that has very different answers depending on industry, depending on maturity of both the company and the industry itself, depending on sales model and competitive landscape. Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.
    - toyg 6y ago
      You say business is about building products, but it really isn't. Business is about making money. Building products is only useful insofar as it enables selling products, which is one way to make money (possibly one of the hardest). So the question becomes, "how do you position an organization to make money?" - and that has a bunch of different answers depending on many factors. Some of these answers are generic cross-sectors and some are not, and recognising the difference is where the much-maligned MBA types can fall short.
    - maxsilver 6y ago
      > But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? I wish that mattered, but I'm not sure it does. Many (more than half?) of all US business are either in non-competitive fields or have semi-locked in customer bases. These companies are effectively money-trees, they could do almost anything and never actually lose enough money to need to fix themselves. Imagine AT&T gets a bad CEO. Or Comcast. Or Ford. Or GE. Or WalMart. Or CVS. Or UnitedHealth. Or ExxonMobile. These companies basically can't get into major trouble, no matter how many bad calls they make in the next 5 years. If you are starting something new from scratch, then you have to worry about product (a new company, or a major new product in a new market, etc). But unless your doing that, your leadership-types often never have to learn anything about the business itself. They can pretend every business is just an identical spreadsheet of numbers, and even if they're wildly wrong, they'll almost never get punished for it (internally, or even by the market at large). This is probably where MBA types get that impression from in the first place. > Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem. I wish this was true. But my experience has been that this is not nearly true enough. Terrible leadership can hang on for decades and never really get in any meaningful trouble for it.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Or in one case I saw they were the friends and relatives of the new CEO.
- irjustin 6y ago
  If they perform well, it's brilliant. If badly, it's cronyism.
  - Jweb_Guru 6y ago
    It's cronyism regardless and should be described as such.
  - mitchdoogle 6y ago
    Cronyism makes no judgment on the qualifications of the cronies. It's just almost always bad because chances are your friends don't have the right set of skills and qualities to be in the position you give them.
underwater 6y ago
It only makes sense in the broken prisoner's dilemma-esque world of broken corporate culture. Where politics rule, the illusion of radical change is more important than the outcome, etc.
- irjustin 6y ago
  I'll need help with understanding which corporate culture is not broken. My naive view being beyond a certain size it's always broken. Just too many cooks in the kitchen.
moduspol 6y ago
Agreed. If I'm going to be the CEO and you (as a board member) are going to expect me to meet these goals over the next few quarters, I need to be able to hire the people I know can do it. It's not in your, my, or the company's interests to give someone already working there enough slack to fail before replacing them and threatening my ability to meet these milestones.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Who better to get things done than people who understand what the company does because they have been there for years?
  - moduspol 6y ago
    People who understand what the company needs to do and can be trusted / expected to execute on that, regardless of how things were done in the past.
djbebs 6y ago
To add to this, this isnt just the case in business. This quasi-feudalism is a nash equilibrium common to most large organizations, from business to politics to NGOs. Its simply a decently effective way to act that will result in stability in power
throwaway2245 6y ago
> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. A better solution, for the company, would be trusting the existing team. Being able to engender trust and showing leadership seems like what an executive should be paid for. The benefit for the exec is that installing their own team gives them a lot more leverage without needing those skills above - since it can be understood that a quickly-installed team will be quickly-uninstalled if you stop getting paid, leaving the company with a void. This is very high risk for the company and seems to me like it only comes about through poor management and nepotism.
snowwrestler 6y ago
Whether this is good or bad depends on the executive. If they are smart, focused on the right goals, and clear communicators, then it benefits the company and staff overall even as it displaces and pisses off some people. But if they are just turf building or resume-padding, then it is essentially exploitative behavior and hurts the company. It’s extremely difficult to tell the difference at first, just based on staff moves. BTW this is true of startups too. They fail all the time even if the founders act like strong startup leaders in superficial ways. Theranos is probably the biggest example recently.

krageon 6y ago

It's unpopular because you're doing harm by perpetuating this behaviour. Lots of things make sense when viewed from the right context (f.e. genocide as a "solution" to world hunger), but that doesn't tell you anything about why it's seen as undesirable behaviour.

legerdemain 6y ago

> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores. During a planning meeting, you decide that Bob should build new feature X. Bob says yes, and then never does it. Secretly, Bob only takes requests from Bill, because Bill hired him into the company and was also his fraternity brother. You go on vacation and temporarily hand off your support responsibilities to your counterpart on another team. When you return, you find that your counterpart has jammed a half-finished feature into your code, making it unrecognizable. Your skip lead leaves for another company. Within weeks, half of your division leaves to follow him. Your support burden triples and no one is left to tell you how undocumented legacy functionality was supposed to work. If startups worked like corporate executives, there would never be a successful one. The entire MO of the executive class is zero attention span, zero focus, and zero memory.

irjustin 6y ago
Sorry, I believe you switched the directionality of my analogy because I agree with you. Corp execs should run like startups. Trusting, fast moving units effective in its execution towards a common goal. When a corp exec replaces a whole layer or unit with their own guys it's because they need to move like a startup does. Or it could just be cronyism - that's always possible too, but I think we're trying to find a positive/useful reason in this thread.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Or it could just be cronyism It's this. In my experience (line manager), when a new C-level is hired, within two years, they've usually replaced 50% of the VP/directors that sit below them in the org. That's far too much churn for it to be because those particular VP/directors are brilliant - by extension, that would mean the outgoing VP/directors were not - except many of them went to work for the recently departed C-level! They can't all be brilliant and they can't all be useless, so we're largely left with cronyism.
  - irjustin 6y ago
    To me, the difference between cronyism vs trusted VPs is simply whether they were successful or not in the long run. And you're right, you lose _lots_ of brilliant talent when the helm changes hands. I think what's helpful is to imagine you are that exec going in to a new position of a large org, 26,000 people, say Chief Marketing Officer. A few know you, but there are a lot of new faces who now have to call you boss and answer to your directions whether they agree or not. You now have to convince each major head that what you're doing is the right thing. How long does it take to build that level of trust? Typically years and a few large projects won. Some of those heads have been around for a long time and don't like the way you do things. If you want to be effective, you don't have much time to figure out who is toxic, who is simply lazy, who resists your leadership. Some resist openly, but most behind closed doors by dragging things, sowing discord. etc etc. You clearly can't keep everyone - it doesn't do any good. At a certain level trust and speed make up for brilliance. Just like hard work/grit can close a gap of genius. Again, I agree with you - lots of good guys are lost. So many times at the detriment of the company, but that means the outgoing leader picked the wrong successor. Separately I enjoy this topic. Its our human condition laid bare.

yxhuvud 6y ago

> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder You also need a team that actually knows the business.

syshum 6y ago
Its seems today, at least at the C-Level, the "actual business" just a interchangeable widget... Business is the business all businesses are in, and if you manage one business you can manage all businesses... So say the MBA
- julienb_sea 6y ago
  Not really... I mean sure you can make an argument about the mechanics of a business being the same. But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? That is a non-trivial problem that has very different answers depending on industry, depending on maturity of both the company and the industry itself, depending on sales model and competitive landscape. Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.
  - toyg 6y ago
    You say business is about building products, but it really isn't. Business is about making money. Building products is only useful insofar as it enables selling products, which is one way to make money (possibly one of the hardest). So the question becomes, "how do you position an organization to make money?" - and that has a bunch of different answers depending on many factors. Some of these answers are generic cross-sectors and some are not, and recognising the difference is where the much-maligned MBA types can fall short.
  - maxsilver 6y ago
    > But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? I wish that mattered, but I'm not sure it does. Many (more than half?) of all US business are either in non-competitive fields or have semi-locked in customer bases. These companies are effectively money-trees, they could do almost anything and never actually lose enough money to need to fix themselves. Imagine AT&T gets a bad CEO. Or Comcast. Or Ford. Or GE. Or WalMart. Or CVS. Or UnitedHealth. Or ExxonMobile. These companies basically can't get into major trouble, no matter how many bad calls they make in the next 5 years. If you are starting something new from scratch, then you have to worry about product (a new company, or a major new product in a new market, etc). But unless your doing that, your leadership-types often never have to learn anything about the business itself. They can pretend every business is just an identical spreadsheet of numbers, and even if they're wildly wrong, they'll almost never get punished for it (internally, or even by the market at large). This is probably where MBA types get that impression from in the first place. > Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem. I wish this was true. But my experience has been that this is not nearly true enough. Terrible leadership can hang on for decades and never really get in any meaningful trouble for it.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Or in one case I saw they were the friends and relatives of the new CEO.

irjustin 6y ago
If they perform well, it's brilliant. If badly, it's cronyism.
- Jweb_Guru 6y ago
  It's cronyism regardless and should be described as such.
- mitchdoogle 6y ago
  Cronyism makes no judgment on the qualifications of the cronies. It's just almost always bad because chances are your friends don't have the right set of skills and qualities to be in the position you give them.

underwater 6y ago

It only makes sense in the broken prisoner's dilemma-esque world of broken corporate culture. Where politics rule, the illusion of radical change is more important than the outcome, etc.

irjustin 6y ago
I'll need help with understanding which corporate culture is not broken. My naive view being beyond a certain size it's always broken. Just too many cooks in the kitchen.

moduspol 6y ago

Agreed. If I'm going to be the CEO and you (as a board member) are going to expect me to meet these goals over the next few quarters, I need to be able to hire the people I know can do it. It's not in your, my, or the company's interests to give someone already working there enough slack to fail before replacing them and threatening my ability to meet these milestones.

bluGill 6y ago
Who better to get things done than people who understand what the company does because they have been there for years?
- moduspol 6y ago
  People who understand what the company needs to do and can be trusted / expected to execute on that, regardless of how things were done in the past.

djbebs 6y ago

To add to this, this isnt just the case in business. This quasi-feudalism is a nash equilibrium common to most large organizations, from business to politics to NGOs. Its simply a decently effective way to act that will result in stability in power

throwaway2245 6y ago

> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. A better solution, for the company, would be trusting the existing team. Being able to engender trust and showing leadership seems like what an executive should be paid for. The benefit for the exec is that installing their own team gives them a lot more leverage without needing those skills above - since it can be understood that a quickly-installed team will be quickly-uninstalled if you stop getting paid, leaving the company with a void. This is very high risk for the company and seems to me like it only comes about through poor management and nepotism.

snowwrestler 6y ago

Whether this is good or bad depends on the executive. If they are smart, focused on the right goals, and clear communicators, then it benefits the company and staff overall even as it displaces and pisses off some people. But if they are just turf building or resume-padding, then it is essentially exploitative behavior and hurts the company. It’s extremely difficult to tell the difference at first, just based on staff moves. BTW this is true of startups too. They fail all the time even if the founders act like strong startup leaders in superficial ways. Theranos is probably the biggest example recently.