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The complexity with the Executive Chairman -> CEO -> CTO sandwich is that Elon also has a day-to-day operating role at the company. That means that he's visibl
by nostrademons 3y ago
The complexity with the Executive Chairman -> CEO -> CTO sandwich is that Elon also has a day-to-day operating role at the company.
That means that he's visible in the office (because bye-bye remote work), and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. It's normally not a problem that the board can fire the CEO, because employees never interact with the board and often don't know who they are. But when the chairman of the board is also an ordinary employee, some fraction of employees will follow the official reporting structure and do what the CEO wants, while some other fraction of employees will follow the "power behind the throne" and do what Elon wants. The result will be a company that can't agree what it's doing, with multiple competing groups working at cross purposes.
This was a huge problem at Google, both in the early days and today. Larry and Sergey would go directly to engineers with ideas, and then those engineers (hoping to get a coveted Founder's Award, and out of respect for the founders) would drop what they were doing and work on Larry's ideas. It worked in the 2000s, because Larry & Sergey's product judgment actually was really good - that's how we got GMail, and Chrome, and YouTube, and Android. But it's also the root cause of much of the organizational dysfunction that affects Google today. Google culture follows competence, not reporting lines, which means that one giant company is actually 1000+ small groups of unrelated projects, most of which duplicate each other, that never integrate quite right, which will often be technically brilliant but then blocked or unlaunched as soon as they cross some competing executive's path.
- skissane 3y ago> and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. Linda, because she is the one who is there every day. If Linda thinks Elon has made the wrong call, she just has to work out how to talk him out of it while soothing his ego, and in the meantime get her team to focus on how to implement the right one. She probably already has that skill, but if she needs mentoring, Gwynne Shotwell can help her out
- nostrademons 3y agoWith Musk in the CTO role, he's either going to be there every day, or Twitter is going to have an absent CTO. Both of them are bad for decision-making efficiency.
- skissane 3y agoGiven he is also CEO/CTO of SpaceX and Tesla, I don’t think he physically can be at Twitter every working day - unless he’s secretly cloned himself
- nostrademons 3y agoThen he's going to be the absent (or worse, inconsistently-present) CTO, which is worse. If he's there then there's at least a chance of him and Linda working out clear roles and responsibilities. If he's totally absent then technical decisions are not going to get decided, which holds up engineering. If he's inconsistently absent then decisions may get decided when he's absent and then reversed when he shows up to the office, which makes it impossible to do any sort of long-term planning.
- iudqnolq 3y agoHe obviously can't be at all three full time. Investors in SpaceX and Tesla have complained he's spending significant time in the Twitter office and neglecting the other two. Just because it would make business sense for him to focus less on Twitter doesn't mean you can assume he will - surely we can all agree, regardless of our opinion on Musk, that he frequently bucks the conventional wisdom on how a CEO should behave?
- theGnuMe 3y agoYouTube was bought and Eric Schmidt was the one who suggested it.
- nostrademons 3y agoI thought Susan Wojciecki was the one who suggested it, she got Larry & Sergey's ear, and then together they convinced Eric.
- theGnuMe 3y agoAh we are both wrong it was Jeff Huber: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1433837480449613839 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1433837480449613839
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago> The result will be a company that can't agree what it's doing, with multiple competing groups working at cross purposes. That sounds exactly like the Twitter I've known for nearly twenty years.
- asddubs 3y agogoogle bought youtube and android