Well, six months later sales and profits were still way down and the new CEO was catching a lot of heat. He began to panic but then he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, “Blame your predecessor.” The new CEO called a press conference and explained that the previous CEO had left him with a real mess and it was taking a bit longer to clean it up than expected, but everything was on the right track. Satisfied with his comments, the press – and Wall Street – responded positively.
Another year went by and the company continued to struggle. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, “Reorganize.” So he fired key people, consolidated divisions and cut costs everywhere he could. This he did and Wall Street, and the press, applauded his efforts.
Another year passed and the company was still short on sales and profits. The CEO would have to figure out how to get through another tough earnings call. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope. The message began, “Prepare three envelopes...” "
IN PARTICULAR, at one Fortune 250 (which no longer exists), we implemented OneWorld to replace the mainframe. After 7 years, we still had the mainframe, AND a badly-implemented version of OneWorld. Then the company got bought by another Fortune 250, moves were made to "commonize" the IT systems, and then the parent company sold everything. But I'm positive that everyone involved in the project to retire the mainframe made the project look very successful on their resumes.
I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nobody is willing to not make changes to find out.
High level management is fundamentally hard to stay on top of over time. It's about as easy as thinking chess is easy because you can theoretically know every move your opponent might make. There are so many moving parts to an organization that having visibility to them isnt enough to perform well. They have to influence most of the business pretty indirectly. If changing things gives you the confidence necessary to keep things running.. that's what you're going to do. Everything is a gamble, so doing nothing is kind of unacceptable leadership behavior unless they are actively taking up the mantle left by previous management and understand it very well already.
It's hard to keep a good (confident, ambitious) team from re-engineering. All the same dynamics apply: In your mind the disadvantages of change are small because you don't know them, but the advantages are large because you planned them. Making change gives you more control over your fate because you are executing your own plan as opposed to staying the course. Finally, how do you keep people motivated to show up every morning if you don't have a vision for change in the future?
I don't think its that different for managers and engineers. There's a lot pushing people to try something, even if the objective odds of success aren't great.
Management are contemporary clergy, spewing high minded ephemera, only to go home unable to point at anything net new left behind by their effort.
I grew up in farm land; we had no middle managers. Somehow food still got grown, harvested, and sold; somehow a Linux kernel and other wildly popular open source exists without them.
Post-WW industrialism needs to wind down. Militant minded people came home and forced their PTSD on workers. We spend a lot of resources equipping people to output nothing in deference to traditional economic memes. America of recent decades necessarily built itself into a production powerhouse to resupply a destroyed world. Such memes are outdated given automation and unsustainable given real material costs.
It's an area that is pretty tough to make meaningful criticism. its kind of a show dont tell type situation imo. If upper management seems under-qualified and overpaid to you, then maybe you have a calling to go perform better and get paid more.
Company management is in underdeveloped game-theory territory. Sure we can isolate one part of their job and describe how they are failing on it, but we dont know the trade-offs being made on a daily basis with their time and focus. a lot of which is going to be company secrets, if it even leaves their personal thoughts. Any criticism that comes down to saying "they should have done more" is likely out-of-touch, for example. Unless you can prove they were actually being lazy.. which is usually not the case, since they are often workaholics (ime). But we usually cant tell if something is a good move or not until it plays out on the market. So making criticisms based on hindsight is weak, as is making criticism that lack the full picture of the organizations goals and the time / energy they actually have on hand to accomplish them
CEO is a very general job role. I dont understand your point with the painters. That would be an operations issue, so I actually wouldnt criticize the CEO of the painting company at all for it. thanks to him/her, I was able to contact a painting company, they showed up, they painted the apartment, and left. I would think the operations team (the painters) deserve to be fired and held accountable for claiming they know how to paint a room when they clearly didn't. Nothing about their job is general or consists of trade-offs. If I said "you only have 10 minutes to paint the room and then leave" then yeah, it might come out like shit and the "excuses" would be valid. which is the kind of time pressure CEO's are often under with respect to things they are actually doing on a day-to-day basis.
i would hold the CEO responsible with respect to resolving the issue and refunding me, etc, since the CEO role is to be responsible for the outcomes of the company.. but he's not the one painting the room. Just like with any company, the CEO does not literally run the company. If service is poor, it is usually because people are finding their way past hiring filters to get jobs they aren't qualified for. Let's not forget that people everywhere are often advised to lie their way into employment, fake it till you make it, baffle them with bullshit, reword your resume to sound more impressive, etc. These people line the mechanisms that CEO's use to accomplish anything at any company.
Of course, the CEO position is no exception to this and I am not saying it is literally impossible to build a case against a CEO. I am saying it needs to fully encompass the position or else you're likely assigning criticism to the CEO for some culmination of lower level operational incompetence that they simply failed to overcome. If a director over-promises to the CEO and the CEO signs off on the basis of trust with the director, then when the bar is not met later of course the CEO will be held responsible but the reality of fault sits with the director, or maybe a subordinate to the director who convinced the director that the over-promise was doable. You then have to get into the weeds of whether or not there were signs the CEO should have seen as to not trust the director, or if they had reason to overrule the directors approach, etc. you then have to do similar things across all areas of the company to derive a valid criticism that the CEO is the common denominator in it all.
Leadership is significantly harder to criticize appropriately than operations. Personally, I would like to stop reading meaningless criticisms from people who want to complain and be heard but dont want to do the work necessary to make a valid complaint.
So if had a horribly painted room that you just paid extremely well to have completed, and the painters came up to you and gave you a laundry list of reasons that they failed... Would you hold off on criticizing them until you had a complete understanding of what it takes to be a painter?
trying to use painting as an analogous situation like that isnt transferable to the point i am making though. Putting the excuses in their mouth doesnt even make sense. We are presupposing that the painters did a horrible job.. while discussing how to decide whether or not a CEO did a horrible job. The only reason you know the painters did a bad job is because we are saying they did. the only reason we can use painting as an example is because most people can imagine a terrible paint job. i.e. we do have a full scope understanding of what it takes to be a painter. I am saying it is much harder to imagine the role of a CEO and what good results would look like than it is a painter.
Maybe my wording was fuzzy, but I am not saying you need a complete understanding of the CEO's role, but it does need to be of full scope. I see that reads near synonymous, so in other words it may be infeasible to account for the total depth of their role, but at the very least the entire breadth of the role should be looked at. If you default to "i gave you a lot of money to make it happen so it should be perfect" type logic; you're just being a "karen". the cost of something has nothing to do with the results, directly. Money needs to be converted into something that helps the work, and in that process we are all still limited by reality; diminishing returns, supply chains, quality of communication, availability of resources, etc. A CEO is at the focal point of all of this, and is human. Whether they get paid nothing or everything doesnt change how effective they can reasonably be.
But they do deserve criticism. it just needs a lot of work to do it right. you have to provide some sort of evidence that across all scopes of work the trade-offs do not make sense. maybe the CEO sacrifices on every front in order to provide the fastest service in the business and is successful in that. If you leave speed of delivery out of your criticism it becomes a meaningless criticism. "They charge a lot for poor quality". "These painters did a terrible job.. (even though I called them this morning, and they were done by lunch which allowed me to do a walk through with a potential tenant)".
All i'm really trying to emphasize is that we absolutely can criticize a CEO, but if you dont do it properly it is very easily washed away by the many unknowns of the position. however, if it is done right - it would be very damning as they cant default to company policy or directives from above as a scapegoat since they are the ones creating such things.
This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.
> when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment
This is the real reason it’s fair to be very critical of their maneuvers.
Reality is not zero sum, but neither are resources infinite. Is it really bullshit to critique more thoroughly that to which more of the finite resources are dedicated?
this kind of aligns with my point tbh. We give $10 critiques to million dollar positions as if they hold weight.
If this is trully BS, then allow lead developers to write checks for their whole team using the company's bank account.
they hold power in organisation, they can increase their own renumeration in a way that's rank and file staff cannot. Executive compensation has skyrocketed in the past 20 years.
If their management is ineffective, then they don't deserve top comopensation.
Satya: 1992, CEO in in 2014 Tim: 1998, CEO in ~2009 Sundar: 2004, CEO in 2015 Andy: 1997, CEO in 2021 Ted: 2000, CEO in 2020
They were all senior executives well before assuming their CEO roles.
That's a very succinct way to put it. I think that observation also applies to consumer technology (e.g. regularly re-doing UIs to "improve" them when the changes are either in fact regressions or just different but not better). We've had it drilled in our heads throughout the modern era that new == better (e.g. the ubiquitous "new and improved!" marketing language), but that's not actually always true. Change for change's sake justifies itself through that misunderstanding.
In the recent past, we had a really high rate of genuine technological progress. But at some point we'll have picked most of low hanging fruit and will enter a period of slower progress, where faking progress will become more an more tempting for producers than the real thing.
Depending where, the real-estate and energy prices are nuts in most places. And, the engineers are expensive right now, and the services are cheaper.
It's not about giving it up, or change for the sake of change, it's about seeing the writing on the wall. These managers see the larger trends, rising energy costs, maintenance costs rising, hiring difficult, and retention of existing engineers impossible. Once you see those trends and a department is underwater and it's getting worse, you have to move. At another point in the market, when you may find engineers are less expensive, easier to hiring, technologies and space are less costly and easy to deploy. You move back.
But how will the cloud providers avoid these trends? They won't. They will have to do the same thing as anyone else: pay more. And therefore charge more. There are economies of scale, but those savings are logarithmic and a company like FedEx is already pretty far out on the X axis.
AWS and Azure probably run hundreds of Fedex-sized clouds and it's their core business. I don't think Fedex is very far compared to them.
Innovations are more likely to happen if it is someones priority to fix a certain thing. I think they hope that savings from innovation and better methods at what ever company they hire out to are passed onto them. It is naive if they are unable to change clouds though that they will see these savings and as long as one relies on vendor specific features on is in that position.
Things that aren't Fedex's core competency.
Or, Microsoft's roofless datacenters[3], or locating datacenters in remote and colder climates, things the big players can do with economies of scale beyond buying things cheaply, they can customise the entire datacenter. Microsoft has experimented with underwater datacenters[4] and modular containerised datacenter extensions[5] which could be datacenters no human needs to be near to work on, or which could be dropped off somewhere with cheap land and power and internet, and picked up three years later and retired from use, or etc. Ideas which are not FedEx's core competency and need large scale and software clustering on top.
While FedEx would be hiring ordinary IT employees to work in a standard datacenter in cheap business park - not very enticing - Amazon could be hiring datacenter workers to work with Amazon's undersea cabling connecting their worldwide datacenters; more enticing work for skilled employees.
Google has been known/rumoured to migrate heavy batch processing workloads around the planet, following the day/night cycles to take advantage of regional cheaper night-rate electricity all the time. Something which reduces their energy costs but which FedEx may not be big enough to do.
[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2016/03/09/data-center-engineerin...
[2] https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineerin...
[3] http://www.500eco.com/exhibits/microsoft-roofless-datacenter...
[4] https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick...
[5] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-develop...
But The Facebook decided to make informatics their core competency, to the point of building their own servers with 12 volts running to the rack, same as Google before them.
There were surely industrial companies in 01922 who decided that management wasn't their core competency (though they used different words), and if they needed help with management they'd contract out to management specialists like Taylor or Gilbreth. They met the same fate that will meet companies today that decide that informatics isn't their core competency.
So where are all these mainframe engineers going to go work? Our company has 3 admins for our two mainframes, and these guys while expert level admins for a mainframe, have trouble with Linux and Windows. Same with the developers writing code for the systems. When all you've worked on is a mainframe, then everything looks like a batch cycle...
That's deep and 100% makes sense, I can see how the cloud is both of these "things."
In exchange I offer two relevant quotes from my quote file:
> The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been. (Luo Guanzhong)
> When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining that the cuff was archaic and ill-suited to contemporary living. It collected dust, contributed nothing. When the trouser cuff returned, did it collect less dust and begin at last to make a contribution? Probably no fashion designer would argue the point; but the question never came up. Designers got rid of the cuff because there aren’t many options for making trousers different. They restored it for the same reason. (Ralph Caplan)
That sounds ... dystopian.
Do you think it's "don't change"? Cause that gives right up on progress anyway. So good luck on getting large shareholders to give you the reins with that message. They're looking for ROI, not the status quo - if you don't evolve, your competitor will, barring monopolies and such. And even there... Microsoft of today is much less dominant than the MS of 25 years ago, and arguably could be worth a lot more had they made better moves. If that's not a compelling example, maybe check out Sears...
Maybe most people in these positions know that change doesn't guarantee improvement, but they know that sitting still is the same as just waiting to be defeated. So maybe there's something less-than-stupid about these "short-sighted" "illusory" changes.
But maybe if you want to be a wise executive, the key is to recognize that change might not just fail to improve your position - it might actually actively harm it. So the good executive is the one who chooses to try to change things according to reasonable calculations about both potential upside benefit and downside risk...
This is one of the biggest reasons many jobs are so miserable. You want to be in the job at the beginning of the"invest" decision. Unfortunately most people get little say in when they join because the information about this is kept internally to the company.
That itself is based on the belief that (historical) progress is an improvement.
Mostly true over the last few centuries - aspirin is nice - except for those occasions where it was mass murder.
That sort of guy. Well he once told me something about executives and upper managers working for corporations that I have never forgotten. He said to me, and of course I am paraphrasing:
"Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'".