Yeah, subject matter experts who learns business seems like the best leaders. That describes most successful founders as well. The hard part is finding those who cares enough about business to get good at it and not just continue being an expert.

That’s overly simplistic. Everyone of AMD’s CEOs was an engineer; not an MBA[1]:

* Jerry Sanders | 1969—2002 | Founder, electrical engineer * Hector Ruiz | 2002—2008 | Electrical engineer * Dirk Meyer | 2008—2011 | Computer engineer * Rory Read | 2011—2014 | Information Systems * Lisa Su | 2014—present | Electrical engineer

And yet only two of them (Jerry and Lisa) are considered truly successful at running the company and one decent at keeping things afloat (Rory). The real answer is much more complex and has to do with Intel’s constant monopolistic actions against AMD; some internal struggles (overheating issues early on, bad laptop support, spinning off business divisions right before they were set to be wildly valuable [Adreno, Spansion, etc], wildly overpaying for ATI, etc).

While Jerry and Lisa are both great CEOs for the company, and all credit belongs to them for their leadership; AMD’s woes were simply more complex than that.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices

I dont know much about all of the CEO's of AMD. However the grandparent comment said not to defer to MBA's not that the CEO was an MBA

What i have seen in other companies is that even if the CEO is a subject matter expert, they get to the level of CEO then start deferring business matters to the MBA's who are viewed as subject matter experts of business. This weak leadership and difference to MBA's often leads to extreme short term thinking and lack of vision centered around quarterly probability statements not around core competences or a vision for making the companies product good

I always say it’s easier to teach an engineer business than it is to teach an MBA engineering. Not shit-talking MBAs since I am one, but the degree doesn’t confer knowledge; only that you passed a selection filter and probably have an extensive network of other people who passed the filter.

Don’t shy away from learning the business. The hardest part of my MBA was accounting — and you can take an accounting class at community college.

That, and avoiding being put down by MBAs who think you’re encroaching on their turf.

I’m a big proponent of domain drive design, at least in principle, but I’ve yet to meet the manager who’s going to let developers “waste” the time of the domain experts on “pointless minutiae” instead of just shutting up and writing the damned software.

I think blaming MBA/Business/Sales people for everything is not reasonable

Good sales people "want" make your company viable by having money

Tech people "want" to have state of art product

Both are good things at different moments of company lifetime

It sucks to have only engineering people and no people who can do business.

No one wants 0 business people, but they don't want them making engineering decisions in a vacuum like business, accounting, and marketing often do at tech companies that don't emphasize engineering/architecture input.

Yeah and it’s way more common to have a problem due to business having too much of a voice than engineering. Business tends to be up-stream of engineering, so this leads to a natural power imbalance. A lot of tech companies have issues that could have been solved by treating engineering as a stakeholder instead of a resource.

The problem is that these two targets have different timelines.

Intel has been dropping the ball in engineering precisely because their teams seem to be focused exclusively on the next quarter/year results.

In a market where it takes 5y to get a product out, you need your people focused in the long term.

If you have the product and can't sell it, game over. If you sell it but don't have it, customers will catch on and game over.

You're right. Save some blame for Wall St and other financial types.

I feel the latter to be the bigger impact..

MBA's are plagued by short term thinking around quarterly earnings not building sustainable businesses

Hackernews in a nutshell. MBA useless in everything. Engineers gods in everything.

If only the world was this simple.

There’s different types of companies that benefit from different approaches.

Engineer leaders tend to have more focus on long term and incremental building. They consider the engineering departments to be the heart of the company.

MBAs tend to focus more energy on sales and marketing, and they generally follow the “internalize profit centers, externalize cost centers” mantra. It’s not uncommon for engineering departments to get axed and externalized.

Semiconductor engineering, and specially computing products flourish i. The first scenario and suffer in the second.

I think what you wrote I found to relate to something I think about often - what is success?

To an MBA, selling off all the IP, selling it off, divesting of key assets and leasing them back, while owning a portion of the relationship at the end is success, treating sales as the most key part of the business process.

To an engineer, in-sourcing, building up strong engineering, R&D, recruiting strong engineering talent, and optimizing product for tradeoffs, treating the output of products itself as the most key part of the business process.

Lisa Su has done just that - if you create the best product based on the best engineering, the buyers will come.

> if you create the best product based on the best engineering, the buyers will come.

In some markets, absolutely. In others not so much.