I am not sure how many hundreds of millions you have made but their way seemed to work.
The fact you literally believe your method of thinking is any different than other employees is exactly why 90% of startups fail.
The company was amazing. No offense but it is not important to convince you of that. And you are certainly not going to convince me that my experience or the stories told by hundreds of others are false.
You could be trying to convince me that management does not matter, as my core claim is that it does. If that is what we are disagreeing about, I would like to know more. Great ideas can come from anywhere but I want to stay evidence driven. It is the only way I know how after working at Creo.
This isn't an abstract thought exercise. You're talking to someone who worked there, so it comes across as irrelevant to imagine people who hated the politics.
I agree with you generally that abstractly one should discount claims of lack of politics. founder soul, founder, sold it, Google for 7 years, then founding again.
The happy lovey-dovey kumbaya-chanting rainbow bunnies that made piles of cash (aka Creo) were the acquiring company. Not the other way around.
Is it though? I've seen a lot of claims about this or that management style or company structure to be responsible for huge profits and growth. It's usually a more simple explanation, such as market timing + smart people. Ultimately it's survivor bias. It could be argued that if this were really the case, all top companies would be using it by now.
It is a massively self-evident fact that a lot more money was made during the “principles” period than after. And the company outperformed its rivals to the point that it was able to acquire competitors with twice as many employees. If “money to be made” is your core objective, you should strive to be more like Creo in the decade that ended a year before its demise.
Decades after the company disappeared, it has a very active LinkedIn Group and people are singing its praises online. If you are right that it was so “toxic”, this is a strange legacy. Interestingly, the core technologies developed by Creo are also still very much alive and, as a very rare example in technology, have not been surpassed technically nor replaced in the market. Technology moved very fast at Creo but their tech has stayed virtually unchanged under Kodak. Amazing.
Where I work now, we do at least three M&A deals a year ( as the acquirer ). I have many ideas about M&A. My ideas about leadership are still very firmly planted and aligned with what I experienced at Creo.