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Comment by jkcorrea | Hacker News Reader

Obviously this is very sad news and I wish all the best & my condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.

I'm not very familiar with how Oracle is run, but it surprised me to see "co-CEO". I always assumed this wasn't a great way to run a company, and yet here is a major exception.

Can someone enlighten me as to why Oracle chooses to have co-CEOs? Is it something specific to their business?

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RIM (Blackberry) was kind of infamous for it.

...the co-CEO structure is very unusual, although some high-profile technology companies, including Motorola and Wipro, in addition to RIM, have adopted it. “Two CEOs with complementary skills and knowledge could presumably lead a firm better (compared with single CEO) and deliver better performance,” she added. “In addition, it might be helpful in retaining good CEO-material employees and avoid having them leave the firm and take their valuable knowledge with them elsewhere, especially if there was an exodus.”

However, Danielova adds, there are probably many more drawbacks to such a structure.

https://www.ibtimes.com/why-does-rim-have-two-ceos-299195

I can't speak to why they have a co-CEO, but I'd just remind you that Oracle is a pretty exceptional company (using "exceptional" in the sense of "not like everyone else" and not in the sense of an endorsement).

Its windy at the top of a company, a lot of pressure and constant need to make good decisions, some companies chose to have two people that complement each other, the sum of it is larger than its parts.

Look, it doesn't take a genius to know that any organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?

You kid, I know, but it was seriously proposed for the U.S. government in the mid-1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disquisition_on_Government

Take my upvote. The Office (S06E03).

With this mentality, we wouldn’t have had women in positions of power or even women voters. Same for people of color etc. I Personally _love_ that some companies, people and countries are bold enough to experiment with unorthodox approaches, because sometimes those ideas work and the rest of us benefit from the learnings.

Eswatini is a diarchy where the King co-rules alongside his mother. A viable model for corporate America perhaps?

I can venture a guess: this is so that Larry Ellison can retain control of the company. He is Chairman & CTO, but since the CEOs are “Half CEOs” he is also virtual CEO. I’d add that this is a good thing. Larry is an amazing visionary, who wrote Oracle Parallel Server during the early days and is also good at marketing. Larry/Oracle sucks at user experience so their client products are terrible. A weird thing about Larry is that he invented cloud computing in the 90’s (he called it network computing) and yet Oracle is late to the cloud party.

Hurd dealt with the sales force while Catz focused on the financial side of it. Larry runs engineering.

They weren't co-CEOs apparently[1]. They just had different areas of authority within the company.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2014/09/18/oracle-ceo-larry-ellison-ste...

It's not extremely common, but it does happen occasionally. It is a very thoroughly discussed topic though.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-major-companies-have-2-c...

Salesforce did it recently. It's about division of labor. https://fortune.com/2018/08/07/salesforce-keith-block-co-ceo...

“I am going to be focusing on, No. 1, the products, the technology—as well as the culture,” says Benioff, “and Keith is very much focused on the operations and distribution functions of the company. We feel it’s going to naturally align with both of our strengths.”

Product, Marketing, Vision, Culture -- vs -- Sales, Support, Services (Business)

It basically reverts back to what start-ups would segment out as Business v. Technical co-founders.

Aren't VP's supposed to satisfy that division of labor?

> focused on the operations and distribution functions of the company

At the risk of sounding dumb, isn't that what the COO is for?

I think it’s primarily a public acknowledgment that they’re as important, maybe even more important, for such a mature company. The kinds of people who qualify, are the kinds of people who dream of being a CEO, and don’t want to roll up to someone else. They would likely go somewhere they could easily be CEO without the bump.

Actually, for years, Oracle had only 1 CEO (Larry). The CO-CEO thing happened in 2014 when Larry stepped down as CEO.

Larry has been quoted as saying in this year's Oracle Openworld conference - “I believe in a dual-CEO structure. The normal case would be dual CEO here for obvious reasons. That it’s good to have capacity and good to have specialization. And then, God forbid, if something untoward should happen, you have capacity; you are not incapacitated.” [1]

1 - https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/18/former-oracle-co-ceo-mark-...

Titles can be worth a lot to employees, but employers get to provide them for free. I think helps answer many questions:

1. Why do most of the programmers at my job have a title of Senior Engineer or better?

2. Why does Goldman Sachs have thousands of Vice Presidents?

3. Why does Oracle have two CEOs?

The only thing that the employer has to worry about is a perception of title inflation, but there’s a tragedy of the commons problem. This can be combated by creating higher-end titles. I wonder when we’ll see a company with a CCEOO.

After HP fired Hurd Oracle/Larry Ellison hired him. A bit later Larry Ellison gave up his role as CEO but staying President of the Board and CTO and the CEO job was split between Safra Catz (financial side) and Mark Hurd (sales, marketing) and the three of them worked together splitting the responsibilities.

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