Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO
bhorowitz.com
bhorowitz.com
And then the list of differences between a wartime and peacetime CEO is just silly. "Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture" ... hmm, seems to me that George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Winston Churchill all did a lot of culture defining, and so did Andy Grove.
It's interesting though to look at the list in light of his self-description that "One could easily argue that I failed as a peacetime CEO, but succeeded as a wartime one." To me it seems like he's describing the CEO he became, and arguing that it was optimal to become that way because they were at war. And quite possibly it was optimal for him and his company in that situation. But going from there to "these are the characteristics a CEO needs when at peace/at war" is over-generalizing.
Remember when MS was losing the internet?
Edit: Fixed the loosing typos. Not a native speaker here - so I'll blame the spellchecker :)
so true, MS still has the Windows, Office, SQL/Excahnge, and XBox businesses. but its failures in the internet mean that it's not seen as a leader, and its stock price is justifiably suffering.
However they are still far from where one would write them off completely.
If it can't, it will go the way of Microsoft. What is that way? That way is the way of IBM. What is that way? Billions of dollars in earnings, dominant market positions carved out, buy over build technology decisions.
So, yes, it's nice (for some) to imagine Google doing it 'again', but they don't have to do it again, I wouldn't say. Just like Microsoft getting crushed by Google really just ended in Microsoft's growth slowing, and their earnings increasing, Google getting crushed by FB, or some new wunderkind is unlikely to evaporate all those billions of dollars in cash, assets and projects.
Ben makes a clear argument that wartime CEO isn't about making people happy, it's about getting people focused.
But yeah, the analogy breaks down at some point. Yes, there are billions of dollars at stake here ... but in the real world, soldiers put their lives on the line and civilians get caught up as collateral damage.
It also contributed to some really horrible software. At one point in the early 2000s I was meeting with Windows architects about one highly-vulnerable part of IE that was causing all kinds of security grief, and the challenges of rewriting it because its API was badly crafted. Somebody explained it like this: "You've got to understand the history. We took a lot of short cuts because we wrote it during a war."
Wartime CEO = Take the chances necessary to have a good thing.
The whole text, while captivating and well written, feels like a plastered on narrative.
I guess the TL;DR is: You don't have to be at the doorstep of "war" to move in that direction. I guess Page sees it on the horizon and is moving to prepare now, instead of when it's upon them.
Did suddenly all the techies buy in the "social" buzzword? I don't really think so: what infrastructural and, in general, technical challenges would Facebook be facing which aren't faced at Google too?
I tend to perceive Google as the technical innovator, bringing magic (1 gB email??? watching the world from above??? and free???) to the real world, whereas Facebook, despite it's cool API and Cassandra, is just vendor lock in.
But I digress: maybe the problem is that Google's already solved the problem leaving no space for new ideas?
Why would Facebook appeal more smart techies?
Most of the draw of Facebook is their 500mil users. I see popularity more than greatness. Google has and continues to do amazing things (unfortunately none of them in social).
Google moving into "social" is like a nerd learning to dance. With enough work they can do it. They'll be awkward at first. Facebook is hosting the dance because they have the biggest house. Facebook is good but mostly because it's the biggest. They don't offer many reasons for users or advertisers to be there other than "everyone else is". They can still become a lesser version of their current glory a la Myspace.
Now Bing is making inroads into Google's search market, and Facebook is in some ways re-wiring the way we manage information (Googles goal). Though they may be leading in numbers with Android now, they have some very serious competition.