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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

Why corporate boards are so inept, and allowed to remain so, I'll never understand.

If you buy into the goal being "shareholder value" then plainly Softbank failed. One could make the argument that WeWork's board did the things that they thought created the most value - but if you implode in on yourself, you clearly failed. Even if the self-dealing was not outright legal fraud, it was plainly not to anyone's benefit apart from Adam Newmann - which again is complicit behavior on the part of both boards. None of it is good business.

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The board has the perspective of _ownership_. The employee has the perspective of _being commanded_.

Imagine something nice that you own- like your car. Do you feel compelled to understand your car? Must you be an excellent driver to own that car, if you can afford it?

No. And while it's not exactly the same, the people generally look at the company as a machine that makes them money. They don't have to be good at anything to own that machine, and if they want, they can even share it with their drug addict fail-child.

This is the ultimate problem with how we've structured public corporations/LLCs in the US. When markets are working correctly in an environment of low innovation, companies themselves becomes the product, and the company's product itself just become a cashflow on a balance sheet. Grow the company (and its userbase) to a point where it can be harvested (go public) and then processed while you get paid out.

Nothing else in the environment matters if it's not on the balance sheet (most notably pollution, social disruption, and general human suffering). Yvon Chouinard has a great perspective on this in his book "Let My People Go Surfing" where he meditates on the paradox of running a private business that fights itself by automatically giving away portions of its revenue to charity rather than paying out shareholders/reinvesting in growth. What do you do when you see every sale your company makes as a failure in the fight against consumption/towards sustainability?

When you see big, tall men with forceful personas running roughshod in positions of leadership, you realize that perhaps we should always remember that we are just primates that learnt how to use tools well.

Before a company goes public, the only way you get to be on the board is by being a cheerleader. After a company goes public you have a lot more responsibilities.

Right - I get that - but my thinking is, why would you make short-sighted greedy choices that are fundamentally bad business decisions? One could say hindsight is 20-20, but I don't buy that. WeWork at its core was a legit business (I say this as a former customer), unlike a say Theranos. It could have legitimately been a wildly successful company without the shenanigans. It seems trite to simply say that the board hoped they would get theirs before everything imploded.

I see what you're saying, but what I'm saying is not even on that axis. If you don't have a history of talking up the startups you are attached to, you don't get invited to be on the board of startups.

If you are critical of the growth plan or business practices, you are fired from the board.

edit: actually we might be agreeing.

I think they justified it by saying that they were aiming to be tech unicorn, not merely a real estate company; and it's par for the course for the board to pump and dump a tech unicorn once they realize the horn is about to fall off.

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