When a company focuses on the management more than the product, technical expertise, and engineering culture, itβs doomed, with pruning of that management being the only way out. This is a song as old as time, in the tech world.
Agree that companies can disappear up their own asses but the value of great management is very high. Satya Nadella at Microsoft for example has been worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the shareholders. Guys that good do not grow on trees - they had Steve Ballmer who didn't know how to do anything except make money. And if Microsoft hadn't hired him 25 years ago, they would have probably had to put some McMBA in charge, and would have had one more Steve Ballmer era. So the value of that hire, 25 years ago, was extremely high.
I get that, but I imagine changing the hiring process to optimize the statistics of getting a CEO will be somewhat opposed to a hiring process that optimizes the statistics of being able to innovate, and deliver a new product. Innovation comes from the bottom up, since it's nearly always a technical constraint being solved.
But, my perspective is primarily the hardware world. Maybe in-house innovation isn't necessary with something like a pure software OS and business suite.
