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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any idea how the makeup of the Disney+ executive team affects their programming. But at least as a phenomenon of executive behavior, this 100% aligns with my experience consulting with senior enterprise leadership at various companies.

Senior leadership at enterprises, in my experience, does very little collaboration. The CEO or the board make a choice to install a senior candidate in some senior position. That senior person drags behind them a retinue of trusted aides and associates, whom they busily install everywhere their reach allows. Most of their activity from that point on is trying to demonstrate that their team is the best, shitting on the remnants of whatever came before them, and forging non-aggression pacts with other people of their rank within the enterprise.

We often saw rolling waves of departures after a senior reshuffle, as departing senior execs took "their people" with them. Why stay if the next boss will consider your existence a threat to their ability to cultivate prominence and influence?

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I'll say the unpopular.

From a business stand point - it makes sense.

You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores.

When you start from scratch it's "easy" to create such an environment. You don't have random people going off and doing random things. Everyone is pointed, focused and hungry to get to the same goal.

If you don't, you run the risk of becoming lazy or hamstrung by politics and red-tape of people who want their rubber stamp to "show something for it". That's Intel vs ARM at the moment.

It's a fine balance. Obviously you don't want "yes men" but you want people who are willing to move as a unit.

I also agree it's terrible. Whole units are ousted because there's a new guy on top. People that gave sometimes decades to the company.

All I'm trying to say is - it's not so clear cut.

  > You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores.

During a planning meeting, you decide that Bob should build new feature X. Bob says yes, and then never does it. Secretly, Bob only takes requests from Bill, because Bill hired him into the company and was also his fraternity brother.

You go on vacation and temporarily hand off your support responsibilities to your counterpart on another team. When you return, you find that your counterpart has jammed a half-finished feature into your code, making it unrecognizable.

Your skip lead leaves for another company. Within weeks, half of your division leaves to follow him. Your support burden triples and no one is left to tell you how undocumented legacy functionality was supposed to work.

If startups worked like corporate executives, there would never be a successful one. The entire MO of the executive class is zero attention span, zero focus, and zero memory.

Sorry, I believe you switched the directionality of my analogy because I agree with you.

Corp execs should run like startups. Trusting, fast moving units effective in its execution towards a common goal.

When a corp exec replaces a whole layer or unit with their own guys it's because they need to move like a startup does.

Or it could just be cronyism - that's always possible too, but I think we're trying to find a positive/useful reason in this thread.

Or it could just be cronyism

It's this. In my experience (line manager), when a new C-level is hired, within two years, they've usually replaced 50% of the VP/directors that sit below them in the org. That's far too much churn for it to be because those particular VP/directors are brilliant - by extension, that would mean the outgoing VP/directors were not - except many of them went to work for the recently departed C-level! They can't all be brilliant and they can't all be useless, so we're largely left with cronyism.

To me, the difference between cronyism vs trusted VPs is simply whether they were successful or not in the long run.

And you're right, you lose _lots_ of brilliant talent when the helm changes hands.

I think what's helpful is to imagine you are that exec going in to a new position of a large org, 26,000 people, say Chief Marketing Officer. A few know you, but there are a lot of new faces who now have to call you boss and answer to your directions whether they agree or not. You now have to convince each major head that what you're doing is the right thing. How long does it take to build that level of trust? Typically years and a few large projects won. Some of those heads have been around for a long time and don't like the way you do things.

If you want to be effective, you don't have much time to figure out who is toxic, who is simply lazy, who resists your leadership. Some resist openly, but most behind closed doors by dragging things, sowing discord. etc etc. You clearly can't keep everyone - it doesn't do any good.

At a certain level trust and speed make up for brilliance. Just like hard work/grit can close a gap of genius.

Again, I agree with you - lots of good guys are lost. So many times at the detriment of the company, but that means the outgoing leader picked the wrong successor.

Separately I enjoy this topic. Its our human condition laid bare.

What are some books that talk about this at length?

Histories of regimes and empires. The Prince and 48 Laws of Power try to serve as TLDRs.

> you decide that Bob should build new feature X

> Bill hired him

So, who's Bob's direct manager? Usually it's the one who hired and can fire the person.

Hum...

The person with the title of "Bob's manager", the person that hired him, the person that can fire him, and the person he will take orders from may be up to 4 different people.

I know that sometimes things like this happen, but it's a sign that organization is deeply broken.

Yup, when the responsibility and authority are not aligned the chances of a good outcome approaches zero.

> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder

You also need a team that actually knows the business.

Its seems today, at least at the C-Level, the "actual business" just a interchangeable widget...

Business is the business all businesses are in, and if you manage one business you can manage all businesses... So say the MBA

Not really... I mean sure you can make an argument about the mechanics of a business being the same. But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? That is a non-trivial problem that has very different answers depending on industry, depending on maturity of both the company and the industry itself, depending on sales model and competitive landscape. Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.

You say business is about building products, but it really isn't.

Business is about making money. Building products is only useful insofar as it enables selling products, which is one way to make money (possibly one of the hardest).

So the question becomes, "how do you position an organization to make money?" - and that has a bunch of different answers depending on many factors. Some of these answers are generic cross-sectors and some are not, and recognising the difference is where the much-maligned MBA types can fall short.

> But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy?

I wish that mattered, but I'm not sure it does. Many (more than half?) of all US business are either in non-competitive fields or have semi-locked in customer bases. These companies are effectively money-trees, they could do almost anything and never actually lose enough money to need to fix themselves.

Imagine AT&T gets a bad CEO. Or Comcast. Or Ford. Or GE. Or WalMart. Or CVS. Or UnitedHealth. Or ExxonMobile. These companies basically can't get into major trouble, no matter how many bad calls they make in the next 5 years.

If you are starting something new from scratch, then you have to worry about product (a new company, or a major new product in a new market, etc). But unless your doing that, your leadership-types often never have to learn anything about the business itself. They can pretend every business is just an identical spreadsheet of numbers, and even if they're wildly wrong, they'll almost never get punished for it (internally, or even by the market at large).

This is probably where MBA types get that impression from in the first place.

> Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.

I wish this was true. But my experience has been that this is not nearly true enough. Terrible leadership can hang on for decades and never really get in any meaningful trouble for it.

They're loyal, brilliant and quick.

Or in one case I saw they were the friends and relatives of the new CEO.

If they perform well, it's brilliant. If badly, it's cronyism.

It's cronyism regardless and should be described as such.

Cronyism makes no judgment on the qualifications of the cronies. It's just almost always bad because chances are your friends don't have the right set of skills and qualities to be in the position you give them.

It's unpopular because you're doing harm by perpetuating this behaviour. Lots of things make sense when viewed from the right context (f.e. genocide as a "solution" to world hunger), but that doesn't tell you anything about why it's seen as undesirable behaviour.

It only makes sense in the broken prisoner's dilemma-esque world of broken corporate culture. Where politics rule, the illusion of radical change is more important than the outcome, etc.

I'll need help with understanding which corporate culture is not broken.

My naive view being beyond a certain size it's always broken. Just too many cooks in the kitchen.

Agreed.

If I'm going to be the CEO and you (as a board member) are going to expect me to meet these goals over the next few quarters, I need to be able to hire the people I know can do it. It's not in your, my, or the company's interests to give someone already working there enough slack to fail before replacing them and threatening my ability to meet these milestones.

Who better to get things done than people who understand what the company does because they have been there for years?

People who understand what the company needs to do and can be trusted / expected to execute on that, regardless of how things were done in the past.

To add to this, this isnt just the case in business.

This quasi-feudalism is a nash equilibrium common to most large organizations, from business to politics to NGOs. Its simply a decently effective way to act that will result in stability in power

> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder.

A better solution, for the company, would be trusting the existing team.

Being able to engender trust and showing leadership seems like what an executive should be paid for.

The benefit for the exec is that installing their own team gives them a lot more leverage without needing those skills above - since it can be understood that a quickly-installed team will be quickly-uninstalled if you stop getting paid, leaving the company with a void.

This is very high risk for the company and seems to me like it only comes about through poor management and nepotism.

Whether this is good or bad depends on the executive. If they are smart, focused on the right goals, and clear communicators, then it benefits the company and staff overall even as it displaces and pisses off some people.

But if they are just turf building or resume-padding, then it is essentially exploitative behavior and hurts the company. It’s extremely difficult to tell the difference at first, just based on staff moves.

BTW this is true of startups too. They fail all the time even if the founders act like strong startup leaders in superficial ways. Theranos is probably the biggest example recently.

I've been working at a multi-national corporation for the last 5 years (and a little more) and your description fits perfectly with what I observed. Also, sometimes the execs leave a couple of years after they start/initiate a new project (before it finishes) presumably using that as their achievement point (although the project they started isn't even finished and eventually fizzles out once they move to the new company) in their CV to their new employer. After seeing that for 2-3 times, I realized that some of these upper management people only start these overly-ambitious (impossible) initiatives just to gear up for their eventual move.

This. At nearly every company I have worked at, some reasonably charismatic C-Level / VP spins up a ambitious initiative which is promised to be a game changer. It looks great on paper and usually contains words like 'change management program' and 'rolling thunder'.

Underneath the fancy slide show is the formula for success, which usually looks like 'Magic + ? = Profit', with the ? being a bunch of tough sledding that inevitably turns into a death march. By the time the death march comes to a head, the executive have moved on or been replaced.

The trick is to move on before the inevitable consequences become clear.

I was once working with a sr exec who was told by his boss: "you're not picking enough fights." They weren't fighting hard enough, pushing for enough change, pissing off enough of the old guard by changing the company's way of doing business. Their boss could tell because people weren't screaming.

The other reason you bring your own people in at very senior levels is because, when battle lines are drawn (do X or Y, where X is better but Y has a collective millenia of man-hours already sunk in), a sr exec has to know their reports have latched their careers to them, and not the rest of the company. Because if that's not the case, the sr exec has no chance at all.

It's Hobbes' leviathan: you are your org, and vice verse. Gotta make sure everyone acts like it.

I was at Disney for almost a decade (possibly at the division ultimately responsible for Disney+, but I’m not positive - it’s hard to keep up with all of the changes and renaming) and this is 100% what I observed there. Over and over.

The ineptitude of the decisions that resulted from this were often hard to believe. And getting ahead was really a matter of getting in good with a new exec long enough to put you in a good position to move upwards to a different part of the company (or elsewhere).

Unsurprisingly, building strong relationships in the workplace and having a positive attitude are ways to advance your career.

This is sound advice that I can definitely get behind. However anecdotally it's not what I've observed to be true. In my above mentioned example, the people with the most and strongest relationships throughout the org were not the most upwardly mobile, nor was there a correlation with positive attitude.

Rather, aligning yourself with the correct (choose wisely) new executive and being a yes-person even to things that you know might have long-lasting negative impacts on the company (and thus your peers) was too often the winning strategy. Even then, it's navigating a political minefield, and one misstep could spell disaster.

The approach tends to put personal gain ahead of the well being of the company. I've seen too many people get ahead by setting vast fires and then walking away. That's not something I can get behind.

What you have described sounds like the MacLeod principle which I read about in the Ribbonfarm posts about the Gervais Principle [0].

I thought it was analyzing satire, then the more I read, it was gospel. Then I found out the author worked where I was at one point (large enterprise) and it all made perfect sense. Internal re-orgs made sense, acquisitions made sense. I didn't agree with how they played out but they were understood.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

That is a great 101 - the idea of stakes, rational trades at each level, middle management's self-preservation... it's all great.

That said, that article should come with a disclaimer: "sociopaths" act unconsciously, not consciously. Purposefully trying to implement the lessons of that series is dangerous.

I don't think the author of that intended the clinical definition of sociopath, at least when I read it I thought of it as "enterprise corporate person out for themselves."

Neither do I - I'm referring to the people the author refers to as sociopaths. Fair clarification

Seen that a few times. In software shops it usually seems to look like a few process changes which change what "good" performance looks like, derailing promotions and other career advancement for people not in the know for the new normal. Coupled with asymmetric expectations e.g. loud criticism of other teams forcing them to move to the new normal while vocally defending their own team. Usually people who were on their way up just choose to leave at this point rather than slog it out.

The best move I've seen in a senior reshuffle is to setup a 1:1 with the new leaders, I've done this with leaders up to 3 managers up. They like the initiative, and it gives you a chance to find out which projects they like, and which they want to end, and what they want to see come talent review time.

I can nod to probably 90% of this just in my own experience working for a large corporation. We get a lot of mid-corporate turnover and it every time one takes over it seems that we quickly find things being changed for no reason, only for it to happen again in 6-24 months when the next passing of the baton occurs.

IIRC we're on our fifth or sixth vice president in the 15 years I've been there and the tiers immediately below that have turned over similarly with people promoting in and out from other opcos, or even from competing companies.

It has never made sense to me. One would think you'd want consistency for long-term plans, only replacing someone if they retire/are horribly ineffective.

> only for it to happen again in 6-24 months when the next passing of the baton occurs.

And each one comes up with a revolutionary plan that has to be completed in that period and you end up with 6 layers of half finished 3 year plans. Each half finished plan makes the next plan harder to accomplish.

Occasionally the plans are even good, just not achievable in the time frame required.

I saw one terrible VP be replaced by a smart and humble VP who made gradual change.

The second guy came in, worked to understand the problems, made a considered plan, sold it to the team, and gradually started rolling it out. And he was totally defeated by red tape, bureaucracy and process.

The first guy who'd come in and broken everything in one fell swoop had to convince his bosses that radical change was necessary just that one time, when he was new and there was no history. He got the green light easily.

The winning strategy for the VPs in that company was to put all their eggs in that one basket. If it worked, they came out smelling of roses. If it doesn't they go find a new gig. But playing the long game didn't work.

How do you observe these things at such detail?

The "a new broom sweeps clean" saying goes back some time. All new leaders want to be visible, and what is a more visible action than a change of guards?

Sometimes I was hoping that this change will come sooner than later. Most notably after a change from a capable CIO to a person who replaced the goal of the company from devops to 1970s application silos.

I've seen it several times with takeovers. There is usually a lot of talk about how the existing team is the greatest asset, that they didn't know how much they were getting. Then within six months they are all gone and replaced with the friends of the new CEO.

> drags behind them a retinue of trusted aides ... shitting on the remnants of whatever came before them

My first exposure to that idea was the process of re-mything after a regime change, as described in The Chalice and the Blade (Riane Eisler). Yesterday's godhead, deity, creation myth, ledger of debts was obviously deeply wrong. Appropriate, subvert, coopt, as able, all the narratives and levers of power. Utterly obliterate the rest.

Then there's The Prince, of course. Sage advice that usurpers should immediately behead any potential challengers, lest they organize and rebel, covertly or overtly, at some future date.

Same as it ever was. I'm only ever surprised, nay disappointed, when someone doesn't clean the slate. They're either not very good, non-serious, or worse.

Then this propagates and dissipates down the hierarchy. Disney is definitely corporate.

Some cyberpunk stuff abuses the word "feudalism", but within companies rather than on the tramped ground under them, I do think it makes more sense? We have lords, retainers, a CEO who's monarchy is somewhat conditional, etc.

This was sort of true at the grunt level for me. When we would get new application managers at my last company we'd also get new team leads who's primary job was to remain loyal to the manager (rather than, say, lead the team).

works the same way at the president / provost / dean level at universities

isn't that precisely the point of changing most senior positions? to refresh the stale management structure of the whole organization?

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