Hacker News Reader

Comment by edderly | Hacker News Reader

The biggest struggles Apple would have with a new leader is establishing that leadership in the minds of the executive team and major/influential shareholders.

A lot of CEOs pretend to be a Jack Welch or Steve Jobs but are often just glorified bus drivers for their corporations. Often they are more concerned with keeping the board happy than analyzing the company product line.

Jobs is unusual in appearing to be absolutely in charge of his company, many other CEOs don't have that luxury or confidence.

View on HN

> are often just glorified bus drivers for their corporations.

Yes, but how far would a bus drive without a driver?

I don't know but the bus driver probably earns less than most of the people riding the bus

Depends where they're driving it. Bus drivers earn significantly more than the barely-over-minimum-wage fast food and cheap-retail employees.

Not in San Francisco!

Most certainly in San Francisco.

http://www.fixmuninow.com/faq.html

On the odd occasion that I've caught the MUNI, I've been under the distinct impression that the driver and I are the only two people on the bus who could possibly have a job.

Doesn't Steve Jobs take a salary of $1/yr?

Pay no attention to the stock options behind the curtain...

If he was really in it for the money, though, he probably wouldn't have let $5+billion in options expire since coming back to Apple, iirc.

At that scale, it seems like the money would just become an abstraction anyway.

What's your point? Or is this just some throwaway Zen?

The point is that bus driver is not a derogatory term but that people that drive buses do important work and give direction to a 10+ton vehicle that would otherwise be going nowhere and take responsibility for the lives of their passengers.

Calling a CEO a 'glorified bus driver' is an attempt at playing down the importance of bus drivers and CEOs at the same time when in fact in both professions the responsibilities are substantial and the price for fuck-ups is immense.

Buses and companies do not drive themselves and if there is nobody or a bad choice at the wheel the corporations, their shareholders, the buses and the passengers will suffer.

> an attempt at playing down the importance of bus drivers

A bus driver doesn't decide where to drive. You don't want to have a CEO who doesn't decide what the goals of the company are.

This is wrong twice, first, a bus driver is in full control of his vehicle, he can't decide on the route but he's totally autonomous in his decisions.

Then, a CEO does not decde 'what the goals of the company are', that's something that will be decided usually in close cooperation with other managers.

CEOs that act as dictators usually do not last very long, typically they'll be the ones to maintain relationships with the outside world at the highest level but that's not reason enough think that they and they alone make the decisions as to what the goals of the company are. A CEO tries to get his people 'on board' with respect to the decision that are being made, and if as a CEO you do not do that you will either find yourself between jobs or you'll face a walk-out of your managers. In many cases the 'goals of the company' are codified either in a mission statement, in the articles of incorporation or in a separate agreement between the major shareholders of the company.

In a company where the CEO is also the largest stockholder it may well be the case that the CEO dictates what the 'goals of the company are', but in that case it is probably better to speak of him or her as the 'owner' of the company in that context rather than the CEO.

CEOs carry out the corporate vision, they do not define it by themselves.

We're writing this in a thread about Apple, and in the case of Apple it is probably right to say that Steve Jobs is the man with the vision who indeed does set the goals of his company but just as he receives only $1 in compensation for his work (he has substantial stock so that is where his real compensation is) he is something of a rarity in CEO land.

You're being really pedantic. The degree of leadership and autonomy required of CEOs is orders of magnitude more than bus drivers. Lumping them together in any meaningful way other than as fellow human beings is disingenuous.

Sorry, but that's nonsense. A CEO that tries to 'drive the company in to the lake' would find himself fired just as fast as a busdriver that did the same.

Really, the autonomy of CEOs is vastly overestimated here and I think that it is in part people like Steve Jobs that re-enforce that myth, but typically the CEO is not the person that decides like some kind of dictator how a company is run.

They do carry final responsibility but that's another story.

Please make a distinction between CEO/owners and CEO/minor shareholders, the difference is huge in this respect.

I don't think anyone is trying to make the point that you seem to think they are. I was responding to the fact that in this comment here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112766), you seem to be drawing some very odd parallels between bus drivers and CEOs. The reality is that most people could drive a bus. Very few could be a CEO. The skillsets and levels of responsibility are just completely different. If you genuinely think that they're comparable, I don't really know what to tell you.

"I don't know what to tell you" came across more snarky than I intended. I just mean that we'll have to agree to disagree :)

> Sorry, but that's nonsense. A CEO that tries to 'drive the company in to the lake' would find himself fired just as fast as a busdriver that did the same.

But it took them quite a while to fire Darl McBride, didn't it?

Weird as it may seem I had the impression that his stockholders and board were actually behind him all the way.

Oh, I agree with you. I just think that he unambiguously drove the company into a lake, though I guess it doesn't matter if the board doesn't realize that.

The CEO is also the top salesman of the company. In many companies, the CEO doesn't actually run the company - he's the face of the company and goes out doing sales. That can be incredibly important.

I think there's little doubt that Jobs is the top salesman of Apple.

Are there really companies in which the CEO don't even control the direction of the company?

I read it as saying that most CEOs are skilled but interchangeable workers, like bus drivers. It takes skill, but the route is set, by the board, by shareholders, by expectations. Of course the metaphor breaks down pretty quickly, but I think it's apt. Jobs took Apple in directions that few CEOs could even imagine, let alone implement. Most would have driven Apple straight off a cliff.

Well, that depends entirely on how fast you're going.

And where you are driving to!

How would the destination of a driverless bus affect its path? I think the major path affectors would be things like concrete barriers, buildings, other vehicles, bodies of water, or large rocks.

I think we can safely rewrite the gp to read 'and what you're driving in to'.

Do you mean "and what you're driving in, too" or "and what you're driving into"?

In to as in "he drove the bus in to the lake"?

Or is that supposed to be 'into'?

Non native English writer here, this one is subtle enough that I don't know if 'in to' is permitted or forbidden.

9.7 Million hits for 'in to the lake' and 23 Million or 'into the lake', if it is an error it seems to be at least a fairly common one.

Subtlety acknowledged. "Into" is correct. "In to" is forbidden.

I guess we've squeezed the life out of this one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com