4 ms·

I guess we'll see how important that role is without any workers.

Sevastopol 5y ago
The average worker is not special and easily replaceable, so workers as a whole organise for changes. The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. You can find new engineers and programmers but it'll be relatively hard to find good replacements for executives like Shotwell, Nadella, Huang, etc.
- esarbe 5y ago
  > The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. Ah, I don't know about that. In the end what CEOs get payed for is to have someone to blame in case anything goes wrong. medicore performance never got a CEO fired, it's just when something goes terribly wrong that they have to take their hats. Usually there's a golden parachute attached. CEOs are overrated.
  - Sevastopol 5y ago
    No. CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. Some companies might share responsibilities differently.
    - esarbe 5y ago
      > CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. I've yet to work in a (large) company where the CEO is actually relevant. Most of the decisions happen at lower, departmental levels. In the initial years, CEOs can make or break a company, but after that it's pretty random. You can have a brilliant CEO that just gets stumped and the company goes bust. Or you can have an incompetent CEO that just stumbles from success to success. In my experience, CEOs get hired because of their old-boys networks that will allow the company to participate to the pay-to-play games with e.g. financial institutes or similar industry handshake-wink-wink-partnerships. They know people that know people, that's it.
      - Sevastopol 5y ago
        If the board is incompetent, then the CEO will usually be incompetent too. A CEO doesn't make every decision for the company, just the important ones. A new CEO has great impact on a company's present and future unless the company is already organized to give /other executives/ most of his or her responsibilities. At the companies I've worked at, lower levels never make far-reaching decisions for the company.
        esarbe 5y ago
        In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. The best thing a CEO can do when it comes to decisions that make a company successful is one thing; recognize good ideas and get the hell out of the way of the people implementing that decision. That's what incompetent CEOs usually do; they get in the way of competent people doing a heck of a job. Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        > In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. Hasn't been the case for me. Even if they didn't come up with, say, a market strategy, they're important in executing it. They lead rather than getting the hell out of the way. >Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing. A good CEO makes critical decisions. Handing off responsibilities if they know their limits is indeed part of being a good CEO.
      - gameman144 5y ago
        Is this a case where you know what the CEO does day-to-day and don't find it relevant? Or that you're not sure what the CEO spends their time doing?
        5y ago
- afroboy 5y ago
  So you telling me if the people where united in a way that they will organize a strike against a specific company, that company will no longer exist? So workers does matter they just have to adapt to the mentality of strikes.
  - Sevastopol 5y ago
    The average worker (singular) does not matter, but they can organise to make demands. You didn't add anything new.
    - esarbe 5y ago
      Isn't that just what CEOs do? Not add anything new?
      - Sevastopol 5y ago
        No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. One CEO can make or break a company, one worker can't.
        esarbe 5y ago
        > No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. I doubt that. In larger companies - the ones that actually have a CEO and not just a very hard working company owner - CEOs are usually pretty much isolated from any strategy, policy or organisation. For that they have upper management. > One CEO alone can do shit. A successful company needs competent workers, the right ideas from engineers and artists, diligent bureaucrats and most of all; a hell a lot of luck. Given all that, even a company with a mediocre CEO can be vastly successful. CEOs are mostly there for the handshakes and because they know people that know people. That's about it.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        CEOs are very involved in strategy, especially when a company is going through a transition. A CEO that can properly navigate the business world through 'handshakes' is important too. Boards pay them lots for a reason. A good CEO is much harder to replace than a few engineers.
robomartin 5y ago
> we'll see how important that role is without any workers We've known the answer to this question for decades: Very important. You can export entire factories to China, layoff everyone in manufacturing, keep management and design in country. Works just fine. Don't believe me? How about this short list: Computing hardware. Hand tools. Medical equipment. Home appliances. Office supplies. Power tools. Etc. What do they have in common? Offshore manufacturing.
- gcheong 5y ago
  Just fine until you can’t get product back into the country because of supply chain issues.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    Supply chain issues apply for components and raw materials too.
- consp 5y ago
  The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. I wonder why that has not been done yet...
  - robomartin 5y ago
    > The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. This is definitely the case. There's a huge pool of talent outside of the US and Europe. One of the mistakes people tend to make is this assumption that you can torture (being dramatic) capital and it will not react, it will just bend to the pressure. This is as wrong as can be. Capital is the easiest thing to move from place to place. And capital, with enough pressure, will always move where it can achieve the same outcome with a lower pain-in-the-ass factor. Despite the popular indoctrinated meme, no, it isn't about greed. It's about getting shit done and staying in business. Our "leaders" over the last 50 years or so, setup a perfect storm, a chain reaction, that is unavoidable for anyone in manufacturing save a few corner cases (military contractors being one category). Say you manufactured coffee mugs. You are doing great. You have two other competitors with equal market shares. One of them decides they'll be smart, move manufacturing to China, lower their prices and grab more market share. They do the math: They are going to make LESS per unit, but think they can increase their market share to compensate for that, and more. They come into the market with their new Chinese made line. You lose a bunch of market share. So does the other competitor. What do you do? You can (1) lower your prices and operate at a loss; (2) lay off a bunch of people to reduce labor costs and use automation to lower your costs; (3) shut down the business and exit the market or (4) move your manufacturing to China. That's it. There might be other options which are generally combinations of the four options given above. You move you manufacturing to China. A few months later, the remining competitor does the same. A year later all three companies are manufacturing in China. They all have about the same market share they had before the move. They are all selling at lower retail price point, which means they are all making less money! Oh, it doesn't end there. A few years later the same Chinese manufacture that makes their coffee mugs decides to sell directly in the US at a lower price. One of the advantages they have is that our "leaders" signed a treaty that makes shipping within the US free for any Chinese product (within certain limits). A Chinese company can get a product from Los Angeles to NYC for virtually free. A US company has to pay full rate for the same shipping. Two out of the three companies go out of business and even more people lose their jobs. > I wonder why that has not been done yet... Oh, it has. Virtually every discipline you can think of has been offshored. From accounting to software engineering and more. I have a quick personal example I can share: We needed to do a bunch of accounting analysis that required a bunch of data entry. Our accounting firm wanted somewhere in the order of $50K to get it done. We got it done by a team of business students in Romania for about a tenth of that. For security/privacy all we had to do was write code to redact (black out) private information (names, addresses, account numbers, etc.) on the thousands of documents they processed. This work required knowledgeable human analysis, so it wasn't a simple matter of OCR -> Excel -> summarize. Capital always tends to find the most efficient way to get things done. Except in government. In that case, assume half is wasted and that's probably about the right domain.

The average worker is not special and easily replaceable, so workers as a whole organise for changes. The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. You can find new engineers and programmers but it'll be relatively hard to find good replacements for executives like Shotwell, Nadella, Huang, etc.

esarbe 5y ago
> The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. Ah, I don't know about that. In the end what CEOs get payed for is to have someone to blame in case anything goes wrong. medicore performance never got a CEO fired, it's just when something goes terribly wrong that they have to take their hats. Usually there's a golden parachute attached. CEOs are overrated.
- Sevastopol 5y ago
  No. CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. Some companies might share responsibilities differently.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    > CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. I've yet to work in a (large) company where the CEO is actually relevant. Most of the decisions happen at lower, departmental levels. In the initial years, CEOs can make or break a company, but after that it's pretty random. You can have a brilliant CEO that just gets stumped and the company goes bust. Or you can have an incompetent CEO that just stumbles from success to success. In my experience, CEOs get hired because of their old-boys networks that will allow the company to participate to the pay-to-play games with e.g. financial institutes or similar industry handshake-wink-wink-partnerships. They know people that know people, that's it.
    - Sevastopol 5y ago
      If the board is incompetent, then the CEO will usually be incompetent too. A CEO doesn't make every decision for the company, just the important ones. A new CEO has great impact on a company's present and future unless the company is already organized to give /other executives/ most of his or her responsibilities. At the companies I've worked at, lower levels never make far-reaching decisions for the company.
      - esarbe 5y ago
        In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. The best thing a CEO can do when it comes to decisions that make a company successful is one thing; recognize good ideas and get the hell out of the way of the people implementing that decision. That's what incompetent CEOs usually do; they get in the way of competent people doing a heck of a job. Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        > In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. Hasn't been the case for me. Even if they didn't come up with, say, a market strategy, they're important in executing it. They lead rather than getting the hell out of the way. >Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing. A good CEO makes critical decisions. Handing off responsibilities if they know their limits is indeed part of being a good CEO.
    - gameman144 5y ago
      Is this a case where you know what the CEO does day-to-day and don't find it relevant? Or that you're not sure what the CEO spends their time doing?
      - 5y ago
afroboy 5y ago
So you telling me if the people where united in a way that they will organize a strike against a specific company, that company will no longer exist? So workers does matter they just have to adapt to the mentality of strikes.
- Sevastopol 5y ago
  The average worker (singular) does not matter, but they can organise to make demands. You didn't add anything new.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    Isn't that just what CEOs do? Not add anything new?
    - Sevastopol 5y ago
      No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. One CEO can make or break a company, one worker can't.
      - esarbe 5y ago
        > No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. I doubt that. In larger companies - the ones that actually have a CEO and not just a very hard working company owner - CEOs are usually pretty much isolated from any strategy, policy or organisation. For that they have upper management. > One CEO alone can do shit. A successful company needs competent workers, the right ideas from engineers and artists, diligent bureaucrats and most of all; a hell a lot of luck. Given all that, even a company with a mediocre CEO can be vastly successful. CEOs are mostly there for the handshakes and because they know people that know people. That's about it.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        CEOs are very involved in strategy, especially when a company is going through a transition. A CEO that can properly navigate the business world through 'handshakes' is important too. Boards pay them lots for a reason. A good CEO is much harder to replace than a few engineers.

robomartin 5y ago

> we'll see how important that role is without any workers We've known the answer to this question for decades: Very important. You can export entire factories to China, layoff everyone in manufacturing, keep management and design in country. Works just fine. Don't believe me? How about this short list: Computing hardware. Hand tools. Medical equipment. Home appliances. Office supplies. Power tools. Etc. What do they have in common? Offshore manufacturing.

gcheong 5y ago
Just fine until you can’t get product back into the country because of supply chain issues.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  Supply chain issues apply for components and raw materials too.
consp 5y ago
The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. I wonder why that has not been done yet...
- robomartin 5y ago
  > The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. This is definitely the case. There's a huge pool of talent outside of the US and Europe. One of the mistakes people tend to make is this assumption that you can torture (being dramatic) capital and it will not react, it will just bend to the pressure. This is as wrong as can be. Capital is the easiest thing to move from place to place. And capital, with enough pressure, will always move where it can achieve the same outcome with a lower pain-in-the-ass factor. Despite the popular indoctrinated meme, no, it isn't about greed. It's about getting shit done and staying in business. Our "leaders" over the last 50 years or so, setup a perfect storm, a chain reaction, that is unavoidable for anyone in manufacturing save a few corner cases (military contractors being one category). Say you manufactured coffee mugs. You are doing great. You have two other competitors with equal market shares. One of them decides they'll be smart, move manufacturing to China, lower their prices and grab more market share. They do the math: They are going to make LESS per unit, but think they can increase their market share to compensate for that, and more. They come into the market with their new Chinese made line. You lose a bunch of market share. So does the other competitor. What do you do? You can (1) lower your prices and operate at a loss; (2) lay off a bunch of people to reduce labor costs and use automation to lower your costs; (3) shut down the business and exit the market or (4) move your manufacturing to China. That's it. There might be other options which are generally combinations of the four options given above. You move you manufacturing to China. A few months later, the remining competitor does the same. A year later all three companies are manufacturing in China. They all have about the same market share they had before the move. They are all selling at lower retail price point, which means they are all making less money! Oh, it doesn't end there. A few years later the same Chinese manufacture that makes their coffee mugs decides to sell directly in the US at a lower price. One of the advantages they have is that our "leaders" signed a treaty that makes shipping within the US free for any Chinese product (within certain limits). A Chinese company can get a product from Los Angeles to NYC for virtually free. A US company has to pay full rate for the same shipping. Two out of the three companies go out of business and even more people lose their jobs. > I wonder why that has not been done yet... Oh, it has. Virtually every discipline you can think of has been offshored. From accounting to software engineering and more. I have a quick personal example I can share: We needed to do a bunch of accounting analysis that required a bunch of data entry. Our accounting firm wanted somewhere in the order of $50K to get it done. We got it done by a team of business students in Romania for about a tenth of that. For security/privacy all we had to do was write code to redact (black out) private information (names, addresses, account numbers, etc.) on the thousands of documents they processed. This work required knowledgeable human analysis, so it wasn't a simple matter of OCR -> Excel -> summarize. Capital always tends to find the most efficient way to get things done. Except in government. In that case, assume half is wasted and that's probably about the right domain.