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"That was around the time that certain leaders in AOL realized that the Internet Operations group under George Boyce was effectively taking over the entire comp
by AtlasBarfed 3y ago
"That was around the time that certain leaders in AOL realized that the Internet Operations group under George Boyce was effectively taking over the entire company, and so of course that had to be stopped. George was given a title without portfolio, and all his people were scattered to the four winds of the company."
So I'm no stranger to middle and upper management Machiavellianism and the costs it inflicts on the organization as a whole, but was that a case of a guy getting too big for his britches and starting to order around / dictate to other bigwigs with the "wrong title", a lack of experience in defending budgetary turf, or the classic tech guy solving problems while the business peers simply scheme?
On a sort of related note, it is kind of saddens me that the historical record of hierarchical organizational decisions aren't preserved / document well in critical areas. There's documents and records out there likely showing where global warming research was suppressed by oil companies, cancer research by tobacco companies, or whatever it is that Halliburton gets away with (apparently funneling aid to Russia currently, but that may be a partisan hit job).
There are usually well documented hierarchies of management and their ostensible areas of responsibility. There are records of decisions and results by the companies as a whole. There's never a kind of historical record showing X group of people in the company were part of the "graph" of decision making that resulted in it.
There's usually lots of fall guys and the like taking the sword for the uppers, but at least you can do some tracing.
Anyone that setup stuff like that would probably get suicided by the CIA, or worse, trumped up and sent to Supermax.
- projektfu 3y agoA lot of companies used to have in-house historians and they did a surprisingly good job in some cases. However, their efforts are always susceptible to a back room deal followed by some sort of public performance to attempt to make the public record look good. These days I can only think of a handful of companies that do that, usually the old industrial giants like IBM, GE, etc. And who knows at what level the historians are involved or if they have access to internal communications.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoCompanies are limited liability. FOR THE INVESTORS. What is interesting to me is that corporations currently pursue some means for having as short a lifetime of retention as legally allowed. But if corporations keeping detailed decision records led to management being the recipient of liability rather than the corporation/profits (and therefore the actual owners of the corp) .... I'm surprised corporations don't actually track internal comms better. Probably because tort law likes big fat corporations to be the target of class action lawsuits, rather than some far more limited pocket middle manager, and law has aligned to that abstraction (for the good of the lawyer profession).
- eep_social 3y agoAs I understand it, the main driver behind retention is discovery. It’s simply that reducing the corpus that must be searched reduces the likelihood that something bad will be found. And even things which seem reasonable at the time can seem bad in retrospect.
- bradknowles 3y agoNo, George was the nicest and most unassuming guy you could ever imagine. He never treated anyone like that. And that was also his biggest problem -- that made it real easy for the vipers elsewhere in the company to backstab him, poison him, and then throw him under the rug. And all of his staff, while they were at it.