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Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; th

Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.

cwkoss 4y ago
Would be interesting to develop an executive/managerial compensation structure that functions like a 10-year call option. Maybe it could feel a bit like TV show 'residuals' - even if you leave the company you'd still get a check in the mail for the company's longer term success. So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters. How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Maybe you could do a 10 year stock grant that is fully vested regardless of employment, and grant the same amount at the same schedule each year (or more frequently) so number of options is proportional to length of employment?
susanasj 4y ago
I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?
- jldugger 4y ago
  > I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. Lenovo isn't even an American company. Wikipedia lists their global headquarters as in Beijing.
  - susanasj 4y ago
    ah fair enough, I wondered if I should phrase my comment as a global phenomenon.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Exactly. A lot of boneheaded corporate decisions make a whole lot of sense when you think about the individual manager/exec who would've been empowered to make that call and which metrics might get that manager promoted or fired. The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph. The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz. The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.
- RunSet 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.

cwkoss 4y ago

Would be interesting to develop an executive/managerial compensation structure that functions like a 10-year call option. Maybe it could feel a bit like TV show 'residuals' - even if you leave the company you'd still get a check in the mail for the company's longer term success. So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters. How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?

cwkoss 4y ago
Maybe you could do a 10 year stock grant that is fully vested regardless of employment, and grant the same amount at the same schedule each year (or more frequently) so number of options is proportional to length of employment?

susanasj 4y ago

I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?

jldugger 4y ago
> I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. Lenovo isn't even an American company. Wikipedia lists their global headquarters as in Beijing.
- susanasj 4y ago
  ah fair enough, I wondered if I should phrase my comment as a global phenomenon.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

Exactly. A lot of boneheaded corporate decisions make a whole lot of sense when you think about the individual manager/exec who would've been empowered to make that call and which metrics might get that manager promoted or fired. The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph. The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz. The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.

RunSet 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law