I hope that this will be used in the future as an example of why MBAs don't always make good CEOs. You may be the best person in the world when it comes to managing a company, but if you're not knowledgeable and passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well. Off the top of my head I can think of 2 more examples: Apple before and after Steve Jobs returned and AMD before and after Lisa Su was appointed CEO.
I once interviewed at a company for a job that was pretty much a dream job - very niche passion. Everyone there was very into that niche.
Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else.
Idk, I can see that as being healthy (in the abstract; you were there in person so I'll bet you had a much higher signal than I do as an internet commenter.) I've definitely seen non-profits be sunk in by groupthink when being too close to a problem. Sometimes an outside perspective is what you need to reframe your approach, as long as it's tempered by lots of insider expertise.
I can see that as a good thing too. CEO is not a know-it-all, not a micro-manager, see's his job as an enabler instead of dictator, values the people lower on the ladder.
The problem with the GP’s description is that the CEO took pride in not knowing the business. A good enabler type CEO who is an outsider to the business would certainly make an effort to build expertise and even passion about the business.
May be. Or they just look at every initiatives from a pure bottom line perspective and have no way of taking guts decision based on what they think might bring the industry forward.
Well, yes. But it depends. I worked for a company which had to go through a re-organization, and in that period we got a new CEO who didn't know anything about the tech, unlike everybody else. But he was great at turning companies around to become profitable, he had done that many times before. So what he did was leaving all technical, marketing, and product decisions to the next level while he worked on getting external funding for as much as possible of our product research and development. He even took on himself to take care of necessary work in people's gardens if that meant they could do some particularly important work on a Saturday, if something critical came up. And finally, his salary was quite a bit less than mine - he said "You're the people doing the work. I don't need that much."
When the ship was turned around to get profitable he left for the next company and did something similar.
The person who founded Elliott Management (Paul Eliott Singer) is far from a saint, but he has been astonishingly accurate during his career. According to Wikipedia (I did a big deep dive into this hedge fund and person after reading the submitted article), he warned about CDOs in 2006. The hedge fund also exited its holdings in Twitter in June 2022, right before the Musk-pocalypse.
I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.
Then you have Peloton... passion project of John Foley (who was president of e-commerce at Barnes and Nobles) that was practically driven into the ground by the same exact mentality.
Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow.
Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven.
Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible.
And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.
Couldn't they simply try to be profitable without scaling (and its issues) to the masses? Or it's VC pressure?
(Honest question, I don't know much about peloton in general)
The original kickstarter wasn't near enough for their initial goals without VC money (they raised 300k, which was only about 1,000 a backer)
And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.
The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.
> passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well
100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp.
Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.
I did a little looking up about Ballmer after reading a book that disparaged his tenure as CEO in examples. He was at MS from 1980. I don't believe for a moment that he didn't care about the company. It was a changing time for Microsoft, mistakes were surely made, but he also laid some seeds for future growth areas like Azure.
This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think.
We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.
Reading Nadella's book is something I think everybody in this industry should do. You understand the impact his son Zain had on him and consequentially the reason why Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost.
> Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost
That's interesting to hear.
My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).
Balmer cared but he didn't care about the end user in the way that we how Jobs and Nadella do as we're talking.
Balmer made office the massive cash cow it is today through amazing licensing - again great stuff for $msft, but there was no product through his tenure that people were like yea, Microsoft! The iphone was dismissed and the windows phone was too late and couldn't play catch up.
Today people are starting to care about Microsoft again. Definitely not 90s love but man I love VSCode. I really do.
Whatever Ballmer's faults, lack of passion wasn't one of them, and he was a founding member of MSFT (probably the first founder after Gates, going back to their salad days as roommates at Harvard), not a parachuted-in hedge-fund MBA. And who can forget "Developers, developers, developers!"?
I see it all the time in computer science. People become programmers because the pay is good. But without a love for the craft, they end up either hating life or being mediocre or both. It really does help to love what you do.
It's good until that mediocre dude makes a bunch of mediocre JavaScript-based crap. And then I have to either import 9000 libraries or rewrite everything from scratch every time I do anything
Some of that liking what you do can also be attributed to chance in the career path one stumbles upon. I’ve had programming gigs that I loved and gigs that turned out, after slowly boiling like a frog in a pan, were disfunctional and skill eroding.
