8-10 years is as long as senior executives last, if they don't make a big change then thee is no way to take credit for their vision. Even if the company had a "perfect" org chart (as if such a thing is possible), they need to make changes otherwise someone will say that they old org chart is the cause of success and they as a leader were not worth anything.
I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nobody is willing to not make changes to find out.
I think we are giving these people too much credit. Being the head of the organization is like inheriting someone elses filing system. the only way for them to actually understand wtf is going on at the company is to reorganize some things in a way that makes sense to them.
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.
I would compare this to asking a dev team to support a big code base without embarking on a major redesign or re-engineering.
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.
That’s not the only way but “come
in and change things to establish dominance” is a commonly taught business school chant.
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.
Yes but they ultimately live materially better lives because of their position, so you can't hand wave away criticism of the value or lack thereof their actions take, especially when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment.
criticism is fair game. it just usually doesnt account for the reality of what they are doing, and puts them to blame for not directly controlling things that in reality were outside their control. Taking responsibility for the failings of the company i part of the job description, so by all means hold them responsible. I am just saying all of that is tangential to the root of the problem - which is that no matter how much someone gets paid, they are still human.
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
What parts of these generalized arguments have anything to do with CEOs? As a mental experiment, put them into the mouth someone making excuses for why a crew of expensive painters did a horrible job painting your apartment.
So true. Reading their over generalized screed left me thinking if CEOs are really that useless anyone could be a CEO and their position isn't special, which sort of torpedoes the entire point.
My point is that properly criticizing a CEO is exhausting so it is rarely done properly.
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.
I think you misunderstood the previous commenter a bit. They were not saying look at the painting example from the standpoint of the CEO, they were saying "Put the excuses" in the mouths of some painters. Also, there's quite a bit of depth and generalization in painting. There are many different types of paint that are better for certain tasks, eg eggshell vs satin finish. Painting walls is different then painting ceilings, then you add in moving furniture, some walls have edging, some walls will be multiple colors, plaster vs drywall vs wood, etc. That's just painting, lets say the company they work for has a CEO/manager that is demanding more jobs completed, now they have to deal with someone telling them "Do it in one day" and all the compromises that must be made to do so. Almost all fields have a lot of depth and generalizations.
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?
yes, if I claim that the painters did a bad job and they gave me a laundry list of professional reasons for it.. I would consider those reasons before criticizing. would you not?
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.
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 is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.
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.
I would expect it is just as much a hedge in case things go wrong. When your job is to steer the course of a company, it won’t look good if you crash and your hands weren’t even on the wheel
I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nobody is willing to not make changes to find out.