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> Case in point, look at how badly JCPenney fared after Apple retail exec, Ron Johnson, became CEO for just 17 months Not that I'm disagreeing with anything yo
by jvm 13y ago
> Case in point, look at how badly JCPenney fared after Apple retail exec, Ron Johnson, became CEO for just 17 months
Not that I'm disagreeing with anything you're saying, but I would like to point out that the changes Johnson implemented are now widely seen as terrible mistakes on his part, alienating huge swaths of the existing customer base. The problem wasn't that "fiefdoms" got in the way of reform, it's that the reforms were actually just poor choices.
Conversely, you could argue that Apple was similarly a huge dying behemoth when Jobs took the reins.
A CEO can make a huge difference on the upside and the downside (and of course they can also make no difference at all).
- danso 13y agoRight, but it's hard to tell what are just inherently bad decisions and what are bad decisions given the context and company culture. Some of Johnson's bad decisions were because they didn't gel with JCPenney's culture...however, to my point, it's possible that Johnson's choices could've worked great if the JCPenney's culture were more flexible. Yes, it's the CEO's job to make decisions based on what she has at hand and what she knows of the ship she's steering. But I think this underscores the point that the nature of the ship is as important to the CEO's initaitives as the quality of the initiatives themselves. So to say, "let's ignore that Yahoo (in the opinion of some) has been a creaky, slow-moving ship for the last 10 years and see it as an entirely new ship now that it has a new CEO" simplifies the situation a little too much.
- WalterBright 13y agoAnd that's why CEOs get paid a lot, even though they seemingly don't do much actual work.