8 ms·

I hope that this will be used in the future as an example of why MBAs don't always make good CEOs. You may be the best person in the world when it comes to mana

I hope that this will be used in the future as an example of why MBAs don't always make good CEOs. You may be the best person in the world when it comes to managing a company, but if you're not knowledgeable and passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well. Off the top of my head I can think of 2 more examples: Apple before and after Steve Jobs returned and AMD before and after Lisa Su was appointed CEO.

christophilus 4y ago
I see it all the time in computer science. People become programmers because the pay is good. But without a love for the craft, they end up either hating life or being mediocre or both. It really does help to love what you do.
- pryelluw 4y ago
  Not love, but have natural inclination towards it. That drives a sense of wonder to learn more. Love comes and goes. Wonder is forever.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Some of that liking what you do can also be attributed to chance in the career path one stumbles upon. I’ve had programming gigs that I loved and gigs that turned out, after slowly boiling like a frog in a pan, were disfunctional and skill eroding.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  I saw this at uni (2002), a lot of people studying there said it was for the job/salary and they didn't know much about it before starting.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I started being a hobbyist programmer in 1986. By the time I graduated college in 1996, I had programmed in four different assembly languages. The last line of code I wrote “for fun” was in 1996. The number of things I’ve done as hobbies since then is a mile long.
- peruvian 4y ago
  Our field rewards mediocrity though, so it's fine. A mediocre programmer at an enterprise company can make a comfortable middle class salary.
  - DharmaPolice 4y ago
    That's a good thing though, right?
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      It's good until that mediocre dude makes a bunch of mediocre JavaScript-based crap. And then I have to either import 9000 libraries or rewrite everything from scratch every time I do anything
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Yes. More professions should be like that. But it is rare enough that it is worth pointing.
manimino 4y ago
I once interviewed at a company for a job that was pretty much a dream job - very niche passion. Everyone there was very into that niche. Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else. Got the offer, turned it down because of that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Idk, I can see that as being healthy (in the abstract; you were there in person so I'll bet you had a much higher signal than I do as an internet commenter.) I've definitely seen non-profits be sunk in by groupthink when being too close to a problem. Sometimes an outside perspective is what you need to reframe your approach, as long as it's tempered by lots of insider expertise.
  - ip26 4y ago
    It sounds like this particular individual was not just an outsider, but also did their best to remain completely ignorant. That’s not promising.
  - DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
    I can see that as a good thing too. CEO is not a know-it-all, not a micro-manager, see's his job as an enabler instead of dictator, values the people lower on the ladder.
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      May be. Or they just look at every initiatives from a pure bottom line perspective and have no way of taking guts decision based on what they think might bring the industry forward.
    - rhaway84773 4y ago
irjustin 4y ago
> passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well 100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp. Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  I did a little looking up about Ballmer after reading a book that disparaged his tenure as CEO in examples. He was at MS from 1980. I don't believe for a moment that he didn't care about the company. It was a changing time for Microsoft, mistakes were surely made, but he also laid some seeds for future growth areas like Azure. This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think. We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.
  - sylens 4y ago
    Reading Nadella's book is something I think everybody in this industry should do. You understand the impact his son Zain had on him and consequentially the reason why Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost.
    - kcartlidge 4y ago
      > Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost That's interesting to hear. My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).
brycelarkin 4y ago
Both Barnes and Noble and Waterstones are owned by the same hedge fund (Elliot Management). Looks like the hedge fund installed the new ceo when they purchased Barnes and Noble. That hedge fund is probably filled with MBAs.
- vasco 4y ago
  It's almost as if people that take a study program aren't all the same.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  https://www.elliottmgmt.com/who-we-are/ https://www.elliottmgmt.com/who-we-are/ There's one MBA on their management committee. Heavily outnumbered by JDs.
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    Appreciate the fact check, although I also doubt JD's have a better reputation than MBA's when it comes to running an aspirational business :)
- shadytrees 4y ago
  The person who founded Elliott Management (Paul Eliott Singer) is far from a saint, but he has been astonishingly accurate during his career. According to Wikipedia (I did a big deep dive into this hedge fund and person after reading the submitted article), he warned about CDOs in 2006. The hedge fund also exited its holdings in Twitter in June 2022, right before the Musk-pocalypse. I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.
BoorishBears 4y ago
Then you have Peloton... passion project of John Foley (who was president of e-commerce at Barnes and Nobles) that was practically driven into the ground by the same exact mentality. Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow. Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven. Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible. And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.
- tm-guimaraes 4y ago
  Couldn't they simply try to be profitable without scaling (and its issues) to the masses? Or it's VC pressure? (Honest question, I don't know much about peloton in general)
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    The original kickstarter wasn't near enough for their initial goals without VC money (they raised 300k, which was only about 1,000 a backer) And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure. The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.
hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
I hope in a few years we'll be able to add Pat Gelsinger and Intel to that list.

christophilus 4y ago

I see it all the time in computer science. People become programmers because the pay is good. But without a love for the craft, they end up either hating life or being mediocre or both. It really does help to love what you do.

pryelluw 4y ago
Not love, but have natural inclination towards it. That drives a sense of wonder to learn more. Love comes and goes. Wonder is forever.
grugagag 4y ago
Some of that liking what you do can also be attributed to chance in the career path one stumbles upon. I’ve had programming gigs that I loved and gigs that turned out, after slowly boiling like a frog in a pan, were disfunctional and skill eroding.
jemmyw 4y ago
I saw this at uni (2002), a lot of people studying there said it was for the job/salary and they didn't know much about it before starting.
scarface74 4y ago
I started being a hobbyist programmer in 1986. By the time I graduated college in 1996, I had programmed in four different assembly languages. The last line of code I wrote “for fun” was in 1996. The number of things I’ve done as hobbies since then is a mile long.
peruvian 4y ago
Our field rewards mediocrity though, so it's fine. A mediocre programmer at an enterprise company can make a comfortable middle class salary.
- DharmaPolice 4y ago
  That's a good thing though, right?
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    It's good until that mediocre dude makes a bunch of mediocre JavaScript-based crap. And then I have to either import 9000 libraries or rewrite everything from scratch every time I do anything
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Yes. More professions should be like that. But it is rare enough that it is worth pointing.

manimino 4y ago

I once interviewed at a company for a job that was pretty much a dream job - very niche passion. Everyone there was very into that niche. Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else. Got the offer, turned it down because of that.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
Idk, I can see that as being healthy (in the abstract; you were there in person so I'll bet you had a much higher signal than I do as an internet commenter.) I've definitely seen non-profits be sunk in by groupthink when being too close to a problem. Sometimes an outside perspective is what you need to reframe your approach, as long as it's tempered by lots of insider expertise.
- ip26 4y ago
  It sounds like this particular individual was not just an outsider, but also did their best to remain completely ignorant. That’s not promising.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
  I can see that as a good thing too. CEO is not a know-it-all, not a micro-manager, see's his job as an enabler instead of dictator, values the people lower on the ladder.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    May be. Or they just look at every initiatives from a pure bottom line perspective and have no way of taking guts decision based on what they think might bring the industry forward.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago

irjustin 4y ago

> passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well 100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp. Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.

jemmyw 4y ago
I did a little looking up about Ballmer after reading a book that disparaged his tenure as CEO in examples. He was at MS from 1980. I don't believe for a moment that he didn't care about the company. It was a changing time for Microsoft, mistakes were surely made, but he also laid some seeds for future growth areas like Azure. This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think. We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.
- sylens 4y ago
  Reading Nadella's book is something I think everybody in this industry should do. You understand the impact his son Zain had on him and consequentially the reason why Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost.
  - kcartlidge 4y ago
    > Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost That's interesting to hear. My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).

brycelarkin 4y ago

Both Barnes and Noble and Waterstones are owned by the same hedge fund (Elliot Management). Looks like the hedge fund installed the new ceo when they purchased Barnes and Noble. That hedge fund is probably filled with MBAs.

vasco 4y ago
It's almost as if people that take a study program aren't all the same.
dsr_ 4y ago
https://www.elliottmgmt.com/who-we-are/ https://www.elliottmgmt.com/who-we-are/ There's one MBA on their management committee. Heavily outnumbered by JDs.
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  Appreciate the fact check, although I also doubt JD's have a better reputation than MBA's when it comes to running an aspirational business :)
shadytrees 4y ago
The person who founded Elliott Management (Paul Eliott Singer) is far from a saint, but he has been astonishingly accurate during his career. According to Wikipedia (I did a big deep dive into this hedge fund and person after reading the submitted article), he warned about CDOs in 2006. The hedge fund also exited its holdings in Twitter in June 2022, right before the Musk-pocalypse. I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.

BoorishBears 4y ago

Then you have Peloton... passion project of John Foley (who was president of e-commerce at Barnes and Nobles) that was practically driven into the ground by the same exact mentality. Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow. Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven. Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible. And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.

tm-guimaraes 4y ago
Couldn't they simply try to be profitable without scaling (and its issues) to the masses? Or it's VC pressure? (Honest question, I don't know much about peloton in general)
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  The original kickstarter wasn't near enough for their initial goals without VC money (they raised 300k, which was only about 1,000 a backer) And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure. The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.

hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago

I hope in a few years we'll be able to add Pat Gelsinger and Intel to that list.