Meg is part of a generation that treated devs (originally called “implementors” when she was young) like interchangeable technicians or “plumbers”. Jobs, was also part of that generation, except he was way “cooler” about it (in order to squeeze more productivity out of his plumbers than say, his original employer HP). Some of Jobs’ peers learned to do the same thing with their plumbers achieving varying degrees of success but a lot of FAILURE. To her credit, I think Meg always has understood you don’t give cash to some half-baked hipster because of their black turtleneck and story about a low barrier to market, but due to her limited perspective (she is not GenX), she didn’t know the proper balance to grow something like eBay into something like $3,000/share Amazon. I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders.
Your comments on Jobs are weirdly off the mark. He had huge respect for engineering and said top engineers could be 10x or more as productive as the average. He certainly didn’t think they were all interchangeable. He said he hired the best engineers because he wanted them to tell him what needed doing or how to do it. Also he never worked for HP.
But technically Steve Jobs did work for HP once... he had a summer job at HP at age 12, which he landed after calling Bill Hewlett asking for some spare parts to build a frequency counter.
I don't think this is a generation thing. The strategy of treating devs as interchangeable cogs is still absolutely thriving in management circles. The only differences now are that it's often glammed up with a bunch of lip service that seems to suggest the opposite approach (but no actions to follow that up), and that there's very successful pockets not using that approach, that aren't representative of the majority of the industry.
I don't think either approach is necessarily 'wrong' either, because I've seen tons of companies have great success with staggering numbers of thoroughly mediocre devs and lots of turnover. But you very likely have to commit to one strategy or the other, the absolute shittest places I've worked are the ones where they're kidding themselves, unsure what they're trying to do, or half way through a transition from one approach to the other.
As dumb and unintuitive as it sounds, I think you can run a big bank very successfully with 200 engineers siloed into small teams of experts, or with 3000 engineers shoveled into big "tribes" (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) of distributed responsibility. But I'm wary of anyone that's trying to do it with 800 engineers, especially the "we only hire the best!" variety. (those three numbers obviously scale with the size of the business and a bunch of external factors).
He would put aside time to identify and heavily recruit engineers he thought were talented.
Scott Forstall has a story about how Jobs was basically afraid that he (Forstall) would be put off by the rest of the HR process and pulled him out and told him he's getting hired and to just go through the motions.
Cabel Sasser from Panic has a story about how Jobs and Schiller tried to recruit Panic to work at Apple.
Bill Atkinson also has a story about Jobs spending a day pitching to him to join the Apple engineering team.
> I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders.
"Mobile only" is a self imposed limitation, so that's on Katzenberg and everyone else who had influence on that decision.
Ebay is often touted as her success credentials, but I really see it as another failure. There was no Amazon when Ebay was big. They could have BEEN Amazon.
Also she bought Skype, but forgot to check that the IP was actually included in the purchase.
I am honestly astonished she is seen in an even minimally positive light these days.
Wow, I wasn’t aware of the Skype IP battle [1]. In that case EBay licensed the underlying IP from the founders.
It is especially interesting in the context of quibi because it appears that most of their content deals allowed the content creators to own the underlying content but require a 2 year exclusive license to the service.
I'm not saying that everything she touched turned to gold, but I am saying that she's one of the most high-profile executives in America. Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race. That's absolutely a stellar career that most people can only dream of.
>Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race
You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent.
I think Meg Whitman is a pretty horrible CEO, not to mention she appears to treat people like shit. This article by Rob Enderle (from back in August mind you) gives a good overview of her poor leadership:
One does not necessarily beget the next. That is, there are plenty of folks who went to Princeton who didn’t make it to Harvard MBA. And many Harvard MBAs who dont become SVPs at major firms. And so on.
In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches?
I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for.
Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
Plenty of people work hard. Most of them do it for peanuts. I guarantee plenty of people at eBay worked harder than Whitman, for example; that place was an exploitative sweatshop in her era. I expect her maids worker harder than her, too.
Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.
Haha. I was about to make the comment that university prestige means didley in actually running a business. Whats worse is they raised more than a billion dollars which boggles the mind on how you can fail so hard with people literally throwing money at it. How amd where did the money burn at that rate?
Whitman's success to failure ratio is astonishing and that failure tends not to be attributed to the prestigious education...oddly.
Do you have actual evidence to back up your “guarantee” or are you just speculating? I don’t understand why so many folks come to the internet to pontificate like experts about things they know so little about.
Speaking of, what managerial caste are you talking about? Your use of that term insults people living under an actual caste system.
So from your analysis, it seems like she’s in the wrong industry? Her elitist background makes her a poor candidate for a B2C company, but maybe, IDK, a hedge fund is where she belongs? Or running anything else where her customers are other elites?
She has a billion dollars. She won. Good job, game over. My analysis is that before she does any more damage she should donate 99% of her wealth and retire. If she's looking to do something socially positive, which I'm not particularly expecting, she could go raise money among her set, or advocate for a cause.
I see the pattern there. I’m from Europe but worked with US management. They came with previous titles, and with good understanding on the importance of self marketing even after hired. All their focus was on delivering the low hanging fruits after that only smoke&mirrors. Then after getting C level position they were fired, and started at another company at an elevated position. I’m not saying this is bad, but not something I would call a stellar career. It elevates people on a ladder but but not in a way Children dream of...
Exactly. And they're responding to the incentives in the system we've built. CEO tenure has dropped dramatically over the decades, while CEO compensation has skyrocketed. I can't find a measure elsewhere, but I'm sure sub-CEO executive position tenure is way shorter.
So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.
Why was this downvoted? I feel this is very true. Having worked a few years in a corporate environment, suits and ties, especially higher up the management chain, are almost exclusively about self promotion, bullshitting, and smoke and mirrors. Throw them out into the wild and they wouldn't have a single idea of how to make a living or business except to get another job with their bs skills.
Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
And people wonder why social mobility is so low in the US...
Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.
Ugh, this is a trite and worthless comment. You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good.
> You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership.
I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped.
I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver.
They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue.
I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore.
Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire?
> Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good.
What are they spectacularly good at, though?
I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful.
The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up.
I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time".
I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky.
Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary.
At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science.
Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’.
Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing.
Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)?
I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants.
Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.
So much of that is pure elitism. Didn’t she spend the most money ever on her race? And lost? How Is that stellar? I’d be ashamed of that. Not the losing part. The trying to buy your way in part.
otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade.
You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.
Katzenberg is more of the legend. I'm not a hollywood person, but recognized the last name immediacy. He is responsible for producing The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, Aladin, and Lion King. Basically the best Disney masterpieces ever, and the only other company to fight Pixar on the big screen. Quibi has always been a terrible idea. I hope he find great success in his next endeavor, maybe a classic USA hand drawn animation studio !!!
That idea will probably bring him to bankruptcy immediately... I'm not expert in the industry but apparently hand-draw animations as an industry are in a serious dump. The animators are seriously overworked and underpaid, especially in japan, so much so that the majority of it nowadays are already being outsourced to places like India and Indonesia. You'll probably burn cash faster than you can literally burn cash if you try to run a business like that in the USA
I can't imagine Katzenberg doing this (I don't think his interests are actually animation or anything "traditional"), but hand drawn animation is just "out of fashion" and the business people don't think the ROI is enough. Look at the budget for Princess and the Frog or other hand drawn projects around that time compared to CG films. Hand drawn cost around $80-100 million while CG is closer to $150 million (a large chunk for both is usually voice talent). Disney had tossed their old animation system CAPS (and I'm pretty sure all their old desks) and they built a brand new pipeline around off the shelf software for the production--subsequent productions would have been cheaper.
DreamWorks Animation, as one existing example, is still doing a lot major 2D projects (though certainly not "traditional hand drawn" as technology has shifted a lot post-Flash) as the animation house brand for Netflix these days. (She-Ra and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, as two recent examples.) At least in "TV budgets" 2D animation is seen as more than competitive again (though it was a much briefer period where all TV projects seemed to be CG, and 2D never really "died" in TV like it did in features) and it's likely just a matter of time and aesthetic drive before someone (maybe even Disney) tries it again at the feature level. (Supposedly Rastetter was still pushing for it at Disney Feature Animation even after Princess and the Frog and right up to his ouster. Who knows when a successor will champion it as a priority.) It probably won't be DreamWorks Animation today unless Netflix has some reason they want to do an animated feature. (It is an Oscar category they could compete in, if they need the motivation to push. Maybe less controversy in that category for winning as a streaming site than their battles over streaming versus theater in other categories.)
(ETA: Oh and I just remembered that Fox, the crazy Australian company not the parts of Disney formerly known as Fox, and its subsidiary Bento Box do have a full Bob's Burgers feature film release on their schedule. Not that it entirely compares to the prestige of a classic DFA fairy tale based film, but there's at least one attempt at a 2D animated feature film in the near future.)
> It's impossible to determine this what-if scenario though, so I agree it's best to leave out the speculation.
What are you talking about, CEOs get criticism all the time. Especially on HN where people are aggressive about their opinions. Just because you can't do alternate reality simulation doesn't mean you can't say anything about this.
I mean might hope the requirement to provide said meta-analysis would fall on the person making the claim that the criticism is sexist, not on the person saying it might not be?
I was not saying it might be, I was stating the premises on which it would be, while also stating that, since we can't claim it either way we should refrain from speculation.
GP then suggested we could claim something, and I pointed out the requirements for that, thus putting the onus on them for making the suggestion we could.
Dude in this thread itself people were riffing on Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs in the history of America. In light of such a thing, I am inclined to think your call for proof is disingenuous. You are asking for a meta analysis of something which might be possible but nobody would do it.
Again, I wasn't asking for proof, I was saying it's pointless to pass judgement without it. I called you out for wanting to do so without anything to back it up.
No you are disingenuously setting the bar too high. I gave at least one example of a male CEO being criticised but you are not even willing to update your beliefs slightly in face of some evidence.
No, it's not evidence in either direction, it's an anecdote.
Also, even if it was, there's actually no one criticizing Jobs in the 12 search hits in the thread, but comparing him favorably. So an unfortunate anecdote at that.
she drove HP into the ground, to the point wear Bloomberg named her the most underachieving ceo
at ebay she purchased skype for 4 billion then turned around and sold it for 2.