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I wonder if there’s any “doers” in that top 100? Or is it all just “discussers” and “deciders”. I’ve owned Apple products forever. But as long as Pournelles La
by travisgriggs 2y ago
I wonder if there’s any “doers” in that top 100? Or is it all just “discussers” and “deciders”.
I’ve owned Apple products forever. But as long as Pournelles Law of Bureaucracy remains on full display, these shuffling of the titanic deck chairs will continue.
I wish it could be otherwise. I wish a company could introspect on itself and say “hey, our doer/decider balance is out of whack, let’s correct” but that just never seems to happen.
- bitwize 2y agoI can imagine Jobs being in there like "Tell me what you've done." "Well, um, sir, we've realigned our strategy around generative AI and..." "No no no, tell me what you've DONE. In the past six months. It shouldn't be hard."
- ein0p 2y ago[flagged]
- eru 2y agoA good enough bullshitter will easily answer that question.
- csharpminor 2y agoJobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake. But lots of execs don't know enough about their own products to interrogate like that. So they settle for BS presentations.
- eru 2y ago> Jobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake. Yes, faking that really well is basically equivalent to actually doing it for real. Of course, there are many good and worthwhile things an exec could have done that wouldn't show up in such a demo. Eg if you increase reliability of your cloud services from 99.9% to 99.9999% that could be huge, but most likely wouldn't show up in a short demo. On the bullshitting front: I remember a particular re-organisation we went through at Goldman Sachs that the local bigwig was explaining to us, and all the benefits it would bring. I made the perhaps unwise decision to ask what observable measurements we could take in a few months to tell us whether the whole thing was a failure (or success). (I suspect the actual main purpose of these semi-regular re-orgs is to shake things up enough so that after a few shuffles person A can eventually land ahead of his former boss B, without anyone ever losing face. And that's a good thing! But hard to admit to.)
- ivell 2y agoSo kind of a chief test officer? We need more CEOs to have that kind of responsibility.
- eru 2y agoA CEO just needs to make sure that stuff gets done; doing it personally is just one of the ways to get there. (And not a particularly scalable one.) For Apple it probably made sense, because the whole company's image and reputation is built on that stick. But eg for a toilet paper manufacturer or a producer of fighter jets, the CEO shouldn't spend too much time personally testing the products. For the former, because presumably the product doesn't change that often. For the latter, because there's not even a single 'user' of the product. The experience of the huge ground crew (with various specialised roles) is just as important as the experience of the guy in the cockpit, etc. No CEO, and actually no single person on earth, has the expertise to judge all of these aspects of use by themselves. That doesn't mean the experience of the users is irrelevant. Just the opposite! But the CEO will have to intelligently delegate.
- knowriju 2y agoWhat do you mean by 'doing' rather than 'deciding' especially at the c-suite level ? I thought that's what c-suites are paid to do - 'strategy' and 'capital allocation'. Any example company you have in mind that has leadership actively 'doing' ?
- svnt 2y agoParent is saying there are too many middle managers/execs and not enough engineers with agency.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 2y agoI don't know why anyone believes that the push for Apple Intelligence was driven by middle management. Sure, engineers could have pushed back because they knew more about the limitations of the tech, but engineers aren't one to understand the macroeconomics driving industry-wide demand and long-term growth.
- breckenedge 2y ago> engineers aren't one to understand the macroeconomics driving industry-wide demand and long-term growth It’s a two way street. Managers can only see the forest, but engineers are capable of seeing both the forest and the trees.
- kgwgk 2y agoI’d be surprised to find “middle managers” at all among the top 100 senior leaders of a company with 150k+ employees,
- svnt 2y agoNot currently, sure, but that path is typically how they get there.
- rchaud 2y agoOr in HN parlance, "MBA management".
- hansmayer 2y agoNo it's more like 'visionaries' (with a flawed vision though :))
- thecupisblue 2y agoWell, that is the problem with them making Siri useful for everyone - it is made for discussers and deciders. Summarise a meeting here. Summarise the report there. Summarise the email from marketing. Schedule a meeting with Jim. Turn the lights on in the kitchen for the housekeeper. While yes, there is some usefulness in having something summarise things for you, most people in their day to day lives don't handle a "100 emails from everyone" and "30 meetings with 40 different department heads" or whatever these people do. Quite a big gap from the market they are targeting with Siri.
- skydhash 2y ago> Summarise a meeting here. Summarise the report there. Summarise the email from marketing. Schedule a meeting with Jim. Turn the lights on in the kitchen for the housekeeper. Isn’t that what administrative assistants and hired help do? To handle the minutia of triage and actually doing the stuff you’ve decided upon? And they actually have to do their job well because (reputation loss, employment, and legal)?
- doug_durham 2y agoThe T100 has many individual contributors. Most Apple managers are "doers". It's an expectation.