| richardhutnik said: Pardon my being cynical here, but I get a feeling sometimes the entire corporate culture is switching over to a rock star mentality, where the idea is to dangle a delusional carrot in front of people, to offer ONE position and have hundreds compete for it, with the delusional belief that you will make it to the top. You have it work like Hollywood, where the idea is to have people undercut one another and have a few make it, and if you can get free labor, you do it. And you embed yourself totally and completely in the marketplace, make workers disposable, and have it so that everything is by the numbers, and make it cutthroat. Everything then touches on what you said. it is all by numbers, and not anyone knowing anyone or their character. HR is run by a giant machine that resumes are dumped in, and the human touch is lost. Throw out any degree of loyalty also in the process, and no one understanding the company as an entity. The CEOs you mention built the companies up from scratch, and have invested their lives in it. The understand and know things and what it takes. But they get replaced by a souless process that eventually has the impact that on them what happened to Atari after Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications. The soul was lost in the process. Well, I guess this goes with corporatism as the driving market force. It isn't pre-corporate capitalism either, it is a place where owners of companies don't even have to concern about liability, just maximizing asset inflation... after all, buy low and sell high. |
The thing to remember is that if there are (and this is qualified by an IF) allowances for a free market - few regulations to favor companies with lobbyists, no major impediments to create/sustain businesses, and such, then such poor practices will eventually be weeded out. Incompetence at the CEO level should bring about failure in a company. If and when it does not, we have a major problem with how corporations work - how are they existing after such foolish behavior?
Circling around to the issue of hiring and investing in the company, we must understand that if companies don't make the right choices, they can face dire circumstances if they act stupidly - from the CEO, to the executive, to the rest of the entity. One could look at the example of AOL during their heyday and their refusal to invest in post-dialup technologies. After broadband began penetration, they capitulated and are a shadow of their former selves... Then someone had the bright idea to buy out HuffPo which may be the stupidest acquisition ever. In such an example, much like HP's, you can see that leadership will destroy both companies, most likely. But that is how the system should work - and these CEOs should be tarred and feathered for it.
Eventually, the system will work itself out, I believe. Companies will continue to fail that practice very poor leadership and continue rock-star hiring of executives. Companies that treat employees right and are driven by a good vision will thrive. Its always been like this for any and all startups. Of course, after the founder dies, leadership usually passes to people of incompetence, but this is a good thing - it weeds out those that are foolish and cannot run a company.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
