351–360 of 386 posts
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Executives should be held personally responsible for kinds of things that low-level employees aren't. That's why executives get paid so much more.
Ok, then fire them from not improving quarterly expectations. Seriously -- this is a real functional system that can work. You're acting like C-level accountability is an edgy suggestion. It very much isn't.
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If your CEO is a lemming, they are not capable of leading a company. They should be fired. If you want to see a real leader, look at Tim Cook. He made decisions based specifically on where the company is, where it's going, and already factored in external factors (such as the pandemic growth). Contrast this to dozens of other "CEO"s who made a horrible decision hastily, executed layoffs horribly wrong, and then vague…
I think that's a bad take. Tim Cook is arguably the best CEO out there right now. Saying all CEOs should just do what Tim Cook did is like saying all swimmers should just be more like Michael Phelps. > When that ship slams into an iceberg, you have failed your core role. I agree with your line of thinking, but I don't think any of these companies failed in their core role. Looking at the FAANG companies, stock prices…
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now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. I’ve seen lots of public post mortems for engineering screw ups. Can you point me to a Fortune 500 public post mortem for a bad acquisition or something else CEO driven?
So far as I'm aware blameless postmortems don't really exist for project level failures. If I propose a new system, say a new load balancing scheme, it staffed and built and then is a failure as a system I am actually going to get blamed for that failure. The same is true for directors and CEOs.
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> Why can't bad decisions be called out for what they are and not be excused as rational economic behavior? My point is that we only know it was a bad decision after the fact. The economy is incredibly complex and anyone who tells you they can consistently predict what comes next is lying to you or lying to themselves. Even experts who dedicate their lives to studying economics get things wrong regularly. Calling for…
To be fair, I think the culpability of CEOs has to be balanced with the corporate boards that appoint them and give them direction, and the major activist shareholders who were the ones who gave them marching orders to the tune of unrealistic growth targets into a volatile skewed economic situation in the first place. But the point is when everyone gets something wrong, there should be time for at least reflection an…
I agree with you there, but when almost the entire industry got something wrong, I don't firing your CEO does anything to prevent that mistake from happening again. If you ask yourself, would it be reasonable to believe another person would have done better in this situation, I don't think the answer can be "yes" when pretty much everyone got it wrong.
The goal of the CEO of a publicly traded company is to make the shareholders money. As much money as possible. If laying people off is the best way to do that, they'll do it. Blaming the CEO for doing the job they were hired to do seems short-sighted. Blame the broken system that incentivizes this, that makes doing it profitable. And then, let's change the system.
I think their goal is to make money by guiding the company in the right direction. If your company needs to lay off a large portion of workers that seems to indicate they failed at something. Either they failed to correctly judge how many people were needed for future growth or they failed to predict the companies direction. The board might not care about this though. Maybe they even intentionally put themselves in r…
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I think that's a bad take. Tim Cook is arguably the best CEO out there right now. Saying all CEOs should just do what Tim Cook did is like saying all swimmers should just be more like Michael Phelps. > When that ship slams into an iceberg, you have failed your core role. I agree with your line of thinking, but I don't think any of these companies failed in their core role. Looking at the FAANG companies, stock prices…
The consequences of all swimmers not being like Michael Phelps are significantly lesser than the CEO example to the point that I don't think this comparison could ever be a fit one. If a swimmer swims more slowly, big deal, nobody cares. If a CEO makes bad decisions people's lives can be uprooted. There's a key difference here.
You've completely missed the point of my analogy. If you compare everyone else the the person who is the best in the category, then everyone else will pale in comparison. Using "You're not as good as The Best" as a reason to fire someone is stupid since there's only one person who can live up to that bar.
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The CEO job is to choose the best prediction of the future from those available to them, and make sure the company executes on it. So yes, that's the bar.
And they're paid handsomely to get it right, when it matters most. We pay them enough to comfortably retire when they get it wrong.
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I am not exonerating CEO as a person. But think in terms of the goal you want to achieve. If your goal is to stop layoffs and convince the CEO to act in a different way that shareholders will not like, the CEO will be replaced. And you will not achieve the goal. Again, the CEO is accountable to law and shareholders. Either you convince shareholders to change their mind or you change the law. That's it. Changing the m…
> I am not exonerating CEO as a person. Well, if you're not trying to exonerate CEOs, saying "The problem is not CEOs. The problem is shareholders / owners" is a pretty strange thing to say. The CEO, as a person, made the decision; the CEO, as a person, is responsible for that decision. The CEO is the problem. > Either you convince shareholders to change their mind or you change the law. That's it. Changing the mind…
No, it is not.
When I say the problem is not CEOs I mean they are not the problem.
If I am manager and I hire poor devs and they fuck up a project, who is to blame? Is it the poor devs who can't code or is it me who hired them?
Did you know CEOs are actually hired to do a job? Hired meaning somebody selected them and decided, "Yes, we want this guy to run the company we invested so much in."
Imagine half of CEO candidates being bad people, half being good ones. Imagine that shareholders will always chose the ones that will only care for their share value and this happens to be choosing bad people.
So what is really responsible here for the problem? Is it the CEO being bad person or is it shareholders choosing bad ones?
Think a moment? What needs to change so that CEOs have are better for their employees.
See the problem? Even if you convince 99% of CEOs to be good people it won't change an iota, because owners will still chose the ones that will further their investment value. Who you really need to go for is shareholders. Make them pay for not treating people right, make it not worth.
> And changing the law to penalize CEOs who do harmful things is met with a lot of opposition, because of people saying stuff like, "The problem is not CEOs. The problem is shareholders / owners."
No, don't go after CEOs. It will just create a new stack of perverse incentives.
Go after shareholders. Because if you make laying off people costly to them, I can guarantee there is not going to be any more layoffs.
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Executives should be held personally responsible for kinds of things that low-level employees aren't. That's why executives get paid so much more.
Do you want execs that never take risks and simply milk cash cows until they die? Do you want golden parachutes? This is how you get these.
So why not speed up the process and at least cut the suffering from thousands of lives and skip the step when those risk-takers inevitably fuck up and overhire? Let all companies be boring cash cows after the initial stage, might even improve innovation from smaller players.
I vote for punish the CEOs.
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> The goal of the CEO of a publicly traded company is to make the shareholders money. As much money as possible. If laying people off is the best way to do that, they'll do it. How is failing to predict market conditions a few months into the future and over hiring part of making a publicly traded company money? If anything, these layoffs are an admission from management that they're wasting money.
> failing to predict market conditions a few months into the future Literally nobody is able to correctly predict market conditions a few months into the future. If you could do that reliably, you'd quickly become the richest person in the world. Faulting CEO's for failing to predict the market is setting an impossible bar. All they can do is respond in a reasonable way to current market conditions and direction. Mar…
How? Understanding broad market trends doesn't give you some god-like ability to time the market. Also worth adding, tech CEOs are some of the richest people on the planet, so they're already at the level where we should expect them to be able to forecast accurately a few months out. That's what they're being paid for, after all.