6 ms·

> "You guys are either going to turn these airplanes in 10 minutes or I'm going to fire every single one of you — and I'm going to hire a whole new crew that's

by geon 11y ago

> "You guys are either going to turn these airplanes in 10 minutes or I'm going to fire every single one of you — and I'm going to hire a whole new crew that's willing to work and turn these airplanes in 10 minutes." Sounds like a great way to fail spectacularly. If it was impossible, it wasn't going to magically work just because everyone was too afraid to tell him.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 11y ago
If it was impossible, the company would have failed: It was a hard constraint for them to turn around faster in order to maintain their flight schedule with one plane less in order to stop losing money.
technofiend 11y ago
It worked in this instance. Sometimes your boss is just a tool and you suffer the consequences. I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours. Sure enough I was regularly sent out to "do something" to fix it because the systems kept crashing. Finally my boss gave me one of those "if you don't fix it today, don't bother coming back to work tomorrow" ultimatums. What exactly am I supposed to do? Rewrite the network driver for this LAN card myself? That was my last day on the job. I heard from a friend the company had to rip the entire network out and give a new one free to customer after he threatened to sue. I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it.
- djrogers 11y ago
  >I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it. Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently useless piece of crap. The salesperson didn't design, spec, or build the hardware. He didn't architect or write the drivers, he didn't QA the product, and he damn sure didn't assume the company would sell something that didn't/couldn't work. Where the hell was your QA manager? Your product manager? Those are the folks that should be responsible for this - not the salesperson.
  - resu_nimda 11y ago
    Without knowing any details, though, how can you make that conclusion? Sales people (especially in high-touch enterprise sales like this) do often promise and sell things they know they shouldn't. They should be well aware of the limitations of the software. I don't know how you felt there was enough information to decide who was to blame in this situation.
  - apalmer 11y ago
    It all depends. From what the parent posted, the issue was the software and hardware combination didn't work. If this was a 'known' issue and it was sold anyways then this is definitely something within the sales organization. It perhaps was a 'known' to the parent but never communicated out to the management or sales staff. However want to point out that the purpose of a sales organization is to sell. typically a sales organization will sell every and anything to the client. It is normal to sell features that are not implemented, or configurations that are problematic.
  - JadeNB 11y ago
    > Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently useless piece of crap. It is not unambiguous, but I got the impression from this paragraph that the salesperson sold it despite directives to the contrary, which surely is on him or her: > I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours.
    - djrogers 11y ago
      Sales teams can't sell anything that operations and product management don't approve. A customer can send in a PO for anything, but the company has to accept it...
      - technofiend 11y ago
        I explained in my reply if you'd like a better explanation.
geophile 11y ago
Sure, it can go spectacularly wrong. It really depends on the manager. I don't know this story at all, but I can see two possibilities: 1) This is a know-nothing manager who doesn't really know much, but somehow correctly identified the problem and picked the correct number out of the air. 2) He actually understood the market, the competition, and ground operations so well that he was able to correctly identify the problem and realize that 10 minute turnaround was possible. I've had managers of both kinds. I was technical lead on a software project, and my manager was a PHB who never played with the software, and insisted that a positive, up-beat, can-do attitude could negate the actual facts. Which were that the software was going to be more time to build than he wanted. And then I've had the other kind, who understood the software, and therefore understood how much could reasonably be expected.
stcredzero 11y ago
> "You guys are either going to turn these airplanes in 10 minutes or I'm going to fire every single one of you — and I'm going to hire a whole new crew that's willing to work and turn these airplanes in 10 minutes." It also worked for adoption of webservices for every part of Amazon's business. Basically, Bezos sent out an email to everyone and said that all systems would be compliant, or every employee maintaining that system would be fired. It has to be that way in big companies with major software architecture/infrastructure changes, or everyone will just passive-aggressively make it somehow not happen.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Survivor bias is really at work with "leadership" books or books about why x company is amazing. A lot of times, companies get ahead by dumb luck. In your hypothetical example not only would the CEO be wrong, he'd chase off the decent talent, historical knowledge, kill morale, etc and we'd be reading a different article about bad CEO's. But for whatever reason, this was possible. No one did a study or talked to experts. It was just a gamble from above. We shouldn't be rewarding that.

by geon 11y ago

> "You guys are either going to turn these airplanes in 10 minutes or I'm going to fire every single one of you — and I'm going to hire a whole new crew that's willing to work and turn these airplanes in 10 minutes." Sounds like a great way to fail spectacularly. If it was impossible, it wasn't going to magically work just because everyone was too afraid to tell him.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

vidarh 11y ago

If it was impossible, the company would have failed: It was a hard constraint for them to turn around faster in order to maintain their flight schedule with one plane less in order to stop losing money.

technofiend 11y ago

It worked in this instance. Sometimes your boss is just a tool and you suffer the consequences. I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours. Sure enough I was regularly sent out to "do something" to fix it because the systems kept crashing. Finally my boss gave me one of those "if you don't fix it today, don't bother coming back to work tomorrow" ultimatums. What exactly am I supposed to do? Rewrite the network driver for this LAN card myself? That was my last day on the job. I heard from a friend the company had to rip the entire network out and give a new one free to customer after he threatened to sue. I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it.

djrogers 11y ago
>I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it. Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently useless piece of crap. The salesperson didn't design, spec, or build the hardware. He didn't architect or write the drivers, he didn't QA the product, and he damn sure didn't assume the company would sell something that didn't/couldn't work. Where the hell was your QA manager? Your product manager? Those are the folks that should be responsible for this - not the salesperson.
- resu_nimda 11y ago
  Without knowing any details, though, how can you make that conclusion? Sales people (especially in high-touch enterprise sales like this) do often promise and sell things they know they shouldn't. They should be well aware of the limitations of the software. I don't know how you felt there was enough information to decide who was to blame in this situation.
- apalmer 11y ago
  It all depends. From what the parent posted, the issue was the software and hardware combination didn't work. If this was a 'known' issue and it was sold anyways then this is definitely something within the sales organization. It perhaps was a 'known' to the parent but never communicated out to the management or sales staff. However want to point out that the purpose of a sales organization is to sell. typically a sales organization will sell every and anything to the client. It is normal to sell features that are not implemented, or configurations that are problematic.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  > Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently useless piece of crap. It is not unambiguous, but I got the impression from this paragraph that the salesperson sold it despite directives to the contrary, which surely is on him or her: > I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours.
  - djrogers 11y ago
    Sales teams can't sell anything that operations and product management don't approve. A customer can send in a PO for anything, but the company has to accept it...
    - technofiend 11y ago
      I explained in my reply if you'd like a better explanation.

geophile 11y ago

Sure, it can go spectacularly wrong. It really depends on the manager. I don't know this story at all, but I can see two possibilities: 1) This is a know-nothing manager who doesn't really know much, but somehow correctly identified the problem and picked the correct number out of the air. 2) He actually understood the market, the competition, and ground operations so well that he was able to correctly identify the problem and realize that 10 minute turnaround was possible. I've had managers of both kinds. I was technical lead on a software project, and my manager was a PHB who never played with the software, and insisted that a positive, up-beat, can-do attitude could negate the actual facts. Which were that the software was going to be more time to build than he wanted. And then I've had the other kind, who understood the software, and therefore understood how much could reasonably be expected.

stcredzero 11y ago

> "You guys are either going to turn these airplanes in 10 minutes or I'm going to fire every single one of you — and I'm going to hire a whole new crew that's willing to work and turn these airplanes in 10 minutes." It also worked for adoption of webservices for every part of Amazon's business. Basically, Bezos sent out an email to everyone and said that all systems would be compliant, or every employee maintaining that system would be fired. It has to be that way in big companies with major software architecture/infrastructure changes, or everyone will just passive-aggressively make it somehow not happen.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

Survivor bias is really at work with "leadership" books or books about why x company is amazing. A lot of times, companies get ahead by dumb luck. In your hypothetical example not only would the CEO be wrong, he'd chase off the decent talent, historical knowledge, kill morale, etc and we'd be reading a different article about bad CEO's. But for whatever reason, this was possible. No one did a study or talked to experts. It was just a gamble from above. We shouldn't be rewarding that.