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I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people have like three to five active business roles on their Linkedins. A fun case of "rules for thee,
by handrous 5y ago
I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people have like three to five active business roles on their Linkedins.
A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied their various chemical habits).
- bluefirebrand 5y agoCareful, you're dangerously close to realizing that Executives at companies provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies. I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company, and essentially a fall guy position so the board can avoid accountability.
- emteycz 5y agoWell yeah, but it's not like any company values its CEO for the good office-desk job they do - as opposed to most other positions. And companies certainly do recognize that not everyone has to sit at a desk - all the expensive consultants...
- wayoutthere 5y agoIf it’s like most of my clients, omitting consultants from the seating chart just means you lose your conference rooms all day, every day until the consultants are gone.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies As it should be if the executive isn’t micromanaging. If a crisis erupts and they’re nowhere to be found, on the other hand, that’s a problem.
- setgree 5y ago> I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company Are you thinking of companies in general, or of reasonably prominent/stable publicly traded companies? The CEOs at the startups I've worked at did a heck of a lot more than that -- fundraising, strategy, resolving personnel issues, talking to clients, etc.; I'm thinking of a small company (10-20 employees) and a mid-sized one (400-500).
- cm2012 5y agoYeah one of the big reasons it hard to sell small companies is that most companies fall apart when the CEO leaves.
- beagle3 5y agoSome. But it’s worth looking at the exceptions to understand the range. On one hand, you have Elon Musk at Tesla and Zuck at FBMeta. Their board is essentially non existent. On the other hand, we had Carly Fiorina, who wasn’t even buffering the board, and was quite horrible at executing.
- jandrese 5y agoBut oh man, when it is time to replace the CEO the first thing you hear is "we have to offer those millions of dollars or some other company will snipe our CEO!" CEO is the only job where the company suddenly decides that it does have to offer the most money to attract the top talent.
- splitstud 5y agoHaving worked at the c level and just below at 3 large US corps, let me just say it matters. Ceo is more important than QB I'm the nfl. It's that dramatic.
- ineedasername 5y agoWell to be fair, good management should be practically invisible. It shouldn't be much of a factor in your day to day work. They should be overseeing larger trends, gently nudging things to stay on course, talking with others to coordinate, etc. I have reasonably decent leadership where I work, and the only times I have much contact outside of my direct reporting line is when something has gone (or might go) seriously wrong. Outside of that, I'm given direction, expected to execute, and left to get on with it as I touch base every few days.
- cjblomqvist 5y agoMaybe at some companies, but I think Steve Jobs might beg to differ!
- ineedasername 5y agoYou're right, there are some outliers where micro managing have been successful, but I consider them just that: outliers. Because only a vastly minor portion of the population has that level passion and tunnel-vision of focus that is also right.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago> They should be overseeing larger trends, gently nudging things to stay on course, talking with others to coordinate, etc. That's the point. The best managers/CEOs are mostly getting out of the way and telling person A to CC person B about a new idea. Not screwing up a system that works isn't the same as adding value.
- BurningFrog 5y agoThat's how it should feel at a well run company. It happens when the CEO has put out any fires before they've grown big. Or possibly when, by dumb luck, the organization runs well without any such interventions.
- dang 5y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- garmaine 5y agoI don’t think that was a shallow dismissal…?
- Griffinsauce 5y agoIronically, (erroneously) quoting the rules at someone is.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoIt's a grand putdown without any supporting information. Comments get more shallow as they get more grand and generic. "Vanishingly little value" is a dismissal. Note also the dismissive use of the j-word ("just") and the implicit admission that there's no particular support for the claim ("I'd bet"). Also the snark ("Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing"), which invokes an entire genre of internet putdown. There's no information here other than booing a class of people. Most people enjoy that when the class is high-status, but we're trying to optimize for curiosity on this site, and that genre is something else entirely.
- Nimitz14 5y agoHow the hell is it not?
- jrockway 5y agoMaybe there's some useful situational awareness that can be gained from being the CEO of more than one company. If there's a problem at Twitter, you can see if you have the same problem at Square. Maybe it's a "how humans organize" problem and it affects both, or maybe it's a social media problem, and only affects one. With this data, you can make better decisions. It's the same for programming projects. It's good to work on more than one, so you can pick apart intrinsic problems that nobody knows the answer to and just artifacts of one particular codebase. You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have.
- handrous 5y agoRight, but somehow the "situational awareness" argument doesn't fly when it's a developer working at two places. Then it's all "oh no, you might steal our secrets with your brain", even though that's the same thing, just framed differently. [EDIT] Oh, and: > You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have. Actually, there is! It's called management consulting. The main value they provide aside from the much-cited blame-absorbing one, is being a normalized and accepted method of corporate espionage. They call it stuff like "industry best practices" but what they're doing is telling you what your competitors are up to, so you can mimic the good parts.
- a4isms 5y ago“Rules for thee but not for me” is interesting when placed in juxtaposition with a famous quote from the software architect and composer Frank Wilhoit: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. That applies to no-moonlighting clauses, but also to no sexual harassment clauses, no insider-trading clauses, and plenty more. It’s not just that the rules don’t apply to some people, but the rules and system are set up to protect them from the rules. With sexual harassment, for example, it’s not just that HR looks the other way when they are accused: HR often works to protect them from consequences and punish/dismiss/pay off the victims. Source: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
- handrous 5y agoTo be fair, it's not like we hide who the system's set up to serve. It's right there in the name. Capital - ism.
- closeparen 5y agoManagers and executives aren't capital. In fact their relationship with capital tends towards adversarial.
- handrous 5y agoMiddle management certainly aren't, that's true, but CEOs often are, or will soon join that group due to their income. It's true that preferential treatment for the C-suite is more a second-order effect, though. A mechanism by which favors are exchanged among and between capitalists, both as a high-tier reward for good servants, and deliberate leverage of the principal agent problem to capture more value personally for those with connections. A CEO can make choices that aren't necessarily the best for their company, but do scratch someone important's back or get them a personal favor of a similar sort elsewhere—see also: board members. So, both because these positions are sometimes occupied by full-on capitalists (who will accept very few restrictions on their behavior) and because, when that's not the case, they're occupied by people who are being rewarded by capital (often for nepotistic reasons) they have much greater freedom than those lower down the org chart. I do think this is a general behavior of class systems—and so, probably any large human organization—however, and not particular to capitalism, and certainly there are better-off and worse-off classes in term of norms and treatment by society, short of the capitalist class (as Fussell observes in Class, with his "mid-proles" subject to close monitoring, tight restrictions on time, drug testing, and other humiliations, while his upper-middle drinks on the job, has their own office with no-one watching what they do, would be outraged at having to submit to piss tests, and cuts out early for golf without consequence). In this case the name just happens to tell us, very directly, who's on top of the pyramid. Not like other systems that may try to obscure who's the most-favored group.
- nostrademons 5y agoMuch of the value that a CEO adds is in figuring out which rules can be broken without adverse consequences. They're accountable for results; if they raise shareholder value doing terrible things but never get caught, that's a win for shareholders, and they get to keep their position. If they do get caught, they get to be the fall guy, they resign, the board gets to say "We are shocked that such things occurred, we had no knowledge of it, the guilty parties have been sacked, and cleaning up the mess they made is a top priority for the organization." Witness Uber, Volkswagon, Boeing, and Wells Fargo. The moonlighting employee has the same options. Don't get caught. If you do get caught, you get fired, just like the CEO. This is also a good portion of why CEOs get paid so much. The average person doesn't like to inhabit the Hobbesian reality that CEOs do, where they're accountable for results and any bad things happening are automatically their fault. They want a world where if they take the right actions and follow the rules, they get some reasonable amount of security. Employment is basically a way to create an artificial island of "if you follow the rules, you get paid", at the expense of the company capturing much of the value you create. Most people take this bargain, because they value security over maximizing profit. Those who don't are always able to take the opposite side of the trade, and become an owner/executive, at the cost of being exposed to all the risks of the real world.
- schnevets 5y agoMy perspective on this might be outdated, but a corporate legal team can do more than just fire you for moonlighting. Depending on your jurisdiction/contract, there could be Intellectual Property ramifications. Obviously, a C-suite can have certain sway in these situations and a company might not go after a lowly grunt's pet project, but there is a wide gap between these two situations where there are worse ramifications than losing a job.
- burkaman 5y agoThis seems like a very naive perspective to me. CEOs are generally not "exposed to all the risks of the real world". If they get fired it's often with a golden parachute and the ability to live comfortably without ever worrying about money or employment. Many times, people become CEO precisely because they aren't ever exposed to real risk, and if something goes wrong they can fall back on savings or family or a debt-free prestigious degree.
- kyawzazaw 5y agoA lot of it is board seats or investment offices
- abootstrapper 5y agoIf you think that's unfair, wait until you hear how much they're paid!