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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

I had an uncle who was a vice president at a fortune 50 company. The executives at the company were not allowed to have a computer at their desks. They all had secretaries who dealt with email, calendars, spreadsheets, etc. The point was that if they were sitting behind a computer doing time consuming clerical work required to interact with a computer, they were being distracted from much more important tasks. The company was more interested in having people at that level who could delegate and organize than to actually do the work themselves.

The skills and kind of work that makes a person successful at one level often leads to lack of success at another.

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Exactly. The C level human I work for types at 10 WPM and their responses looks like Charlies posts from Flowers for Algernon. Not the best use of their time.

They talk at about 2.3 million words per min and a 20 second conversation gets sent back by the exec assistant or one of the reports. Brilliant person, email isn't their forte.

"Is this the most important use of my time" is on their wall. Email isn't it. It works other ways, a voice mail from Hawking isn't the best use of his time.

Charlie at what point in the book?!

While I agree with your premise about different types of work, and while I agree there's some level of clerical work required to interact with a computer, computers can do far more than clerical work, and can provide intellectual leverage when used properly. Banning a high-level executive from using something that gives them intellectual leverage holds the organization back.

You have to think, people - especially senior executives at fortune 50 companies - don't like being arbitrarily held back when they have a job to do. If they want to use a computer, I imagine that these ambitious people would fight the CEO tooth and nail to get access to one. Probably people on the board whom the CEO is politically motivated to please are also banned from using these computers.

People tend not to ban things before they're widely used and cause some sort of problem. I imagine there was a time at his company where his executives used computers. People would have a memory of the time before the computer ban, and compare it every day to the time after the computer ban.

These executives probably had stellar track records, had the motivation to do better, had the previous experience of using computers, had political sway, and still failed to convince the CEO.

And yet, with nothing more than a brief description of the abstract idea, and a firm belief that computers are valuable, a Hacker News commenter has been able to diagnose that it's holding their company back.

That's not to say that CEOs can't make bad decisions, but we don't even know what the company does or what they sell. Probably neither of us have worked there. It seems a little premature to rebel at his decision.

You can delegate the non clerical tasks to your "office of the CXO type staff as well, thereby creating additional leverage.

Read an article last month that was somewhat seriously asking if Trump has ever used a computer: http://gizmodo.com/has-donald-trump-ever-used-a-computer-176...

When was this?

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