Once you put an accountant or MBA in charge of any company the company is dead. You can’t cost manage your way to growth.
Meanwhile, Boeing sold deadly products under leadership by their engineer CEO.
I see the "bean counter bad" narrative a lot here, but I don't think it's that black and white.
It seems to me like the disposition of the CEO matters a lot more than their formal background. If an engineer rose through the ranks by siding with the MBA/accountants/bean-counting-culture in a company, he is likely to run it in the (presumably correctly maligned) bean-counting ways. Whereas an accountant who understands the bean-counters but has seen the pitfalls of that kind of management could easily decide not to manage like a bean-counter.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0402290256feb29-story.htm...
It seems like there should be a lot of overlap, but I think accountants have a better grasp of the underlying business reality. Or at lest the idea that you can’t get something for nothing so saving money on X likely costs you elsewhere.
I remember hearing I think in a documentary that the merger with McDonall-Douglas made it have a more business-y culture that lead the the terrible failures.
The person who pushed back the hardest against the McDonnell-Douglas merger was the Boeing CFO Boyd Givan. He was quickly ousted not long after the deal was finalized, accused of being too financially conservative compared to McDonnell-Douglas' M.O.: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug...
The blame ultimately rests with the Boeing board. There was a minority faction on the board that fought tooth-and-nail. They couldn't stop it, but IIRC their concession (to prevent the minority from creating a ruckus in public) was being able to keep Givan as CFO after the merger. But Condit ensured that that didn't last long by undermining Givan at every turn, which was probably the plan of the majority board faction all along.
Based on this and a few other anecdotes, and if we're making wild speculations, I'd say that whether a CFO makes a good CEO depends on the type of CFO. There's the traditional CFO--the "bean counter"--whose job is to manage the money and keep a low profile so the rest of the company can do their thing. Then there are the new generations of CFO, which started coming up the ranks in the 1970s and 1980s (see, e.g., McDonnell-Douglas), who see creative accounting (aka financial engineering) as a legitimate way to boost stockholder value and an end in itself, independent of a company's core competency. If a company has good bones, a traditional CFO can make a great steward at the very least. For the new type of CFO, they often couldn't care less about a company's core competency, and are more speculator than bean counter, at least in the traditional meanings of those terms.
At the time that these key bad decisions were made for the 737 Max, Dennis Muilenberg- the engineer you cite- was running the Boeing Integrated Defense side of the house and had no authority on the 737 Max. He does bear some responsibility for the Max- he was CEO when it first flew, got certified, was delivered to customers, and the first crash that was not investigated with appropriate speed- but the most important bad decision was made when a MBA was running the company.
International airliners and semiconductors are two areas where I've become convinced that engineering CEO's are required, because they both involve making 10 billion or more dollar investments that won't even enter the market for more than 5 years. So you need someone with a very good feel for technological possibility, one who understands that you can't bafflegab mother nature the way that Harvard's MBA school teaches you to.
It's possible I'm over-indexing on Boeing and Intel: Airbus' big recent fiasco- though since it didn't kill anyone it's not nearly as big as the 737 Max- the A380, was largely a commercial failure not an engineering one (by some estimates the A380 never even turned a profit on fly-away costs, totally ignoring development costs). So maybe having Harvard MBA's and market people would have saved them. On the other hand, when those key decisions were made (2000 was when the A3XX was approved) Airbus had a convoluted two CEO-two Chairman structure designed (to this American's jaded eye) to prevent any personal responsibility from leaching back to the bosses, so I can't tell you who was in charge when the wrong decisions were made for that program.
Rackspace on the other hand is in the middle of a pretty cut-throat market segment, with lots of competitors and a large need to keep up with them feature wise. You absolutely need a visionary / this is what our market will look like in 3 years person running the show here. Rackspace could have filled a need between Digital Ocean and AWS, but I don't think they ever saw it that way....
Tim Cook: degree in industrial engineering and by all accounts an operational wizard for supply chain management. That’s why he was COO of Apple for long time focused on how to get components into its iPhone.
Satya Nadella: electrical engineer with a CS degree and then an MBA and at Microsoft started as an engineer.
Can’t speak to Jamie Dimon as banking and finance is outside my wheelhouse, but certainly neither Cook nor Nadella are examples of MBAs who don’t understand their product line. Arguably Apple’s is a much simpler product line to understand whereas Nadella has many more B2B and B2C product lines, but I don’t think the only thing Cook is thinking about are cost downs.
The parent comment (and a common HN trope) was about how awful MBAs are at running companies. Those are 3 counterexamples to that trope. All three are highly successful in their CEO roles.
Given that Engineer -> MBA is a pretty common path, maybe we should just stop with the broad strokes?
Jamie Dimon comes from financial services, which is a very different industry. Engineering minded firms in financial services were sponsored by finance folks that believed engineering / science / math / computer techniques towards finance would make them more competitive. Internally at JPMC Dimon invests heavily in tech and gives tech engineering leadership autonomy. So as CEO he has delegated a lot to the engineering culture and shielded it from the accountants and MBAs. (Again, MBA the state of being which can not be attributed solely to spending two years in a program)
MBA vs. not-MBA is an oversimplification. Especially since someone can have an engineering degree or whatever and an MBA. But that's not a no true scotsman. There is a pretty clear dividing line between the two groups.
It's a lack of experience + ego inflation from an advanced degree that is a dangerous combination.
As your examples show, it also doesn't disqualify you. In fact there are plenty of roles where it brings value.
But the model of "I have an MBA, I can run any kind of business" is dramatically false. You need to have useful theories about how the company actually works to run it. And the theories by which tech companies work usually make a lot more sense if you have a tech background.
There are exceptions - for example Meg Whitman did an excellent job of building eBay when she took over early on - but they are notable as exceptions. And I know of no exceptions among companies who are in one way or another primarily selling their tech expertise.
Windows Vista and 8 were widely seen as colossal failures, Windows Mobile got utterly destroyed by a series of dumbass decisions, Windows 10/11 is a mess UI-wise, where the fuck does one even want to begin when it serves ads in the start menu, vendors keep pushing bloatware crap because Microsoft allows them to, developer experience is a mess because there are just so many different UI and other frameworks (although tooling does have improved since the days you had to shell out thousands for Visual Studio), Microsoft software in general is riddled with bugs and security issues to a degree it puts even Adobe Flash to shame, its Office suite is a hotbed of UI issues, bugs and privacy issues...
Microsoft is only being kept alive because of business moat, the competition being too focused on fucking up each other in bike-shedding and purity contests (a general issue in anything Linux sans, to a degree, the kernel) and doesn't have the money to hire actual UI/UX experts or, in the case of Apple, is just too expensive.
People keep thinking about Microsoft in 2001 terms but it's not the same company. This what Satya Nadella brought to Microsoft (don't think it would have played out like this under Balmer).
What do you suggest instead?
On the other side, projects aiming to replace sometimes decades-old infrastructure like init scripts also have to be more open towards community feedback.
Both sides need to relax, the effort lost on clearly doomed projects is absurd, and the sometimes extremely heated and rough, barely civilized "debates" continue to alienate new and existing developers.
People whine and complain all the time about "codes of conduct" - and sometimes for good reason, power tripping committees are just as bad as what they want to prevent - but it is clear that all the infighting is the major factor keeping open source software from widespread recognition.
Do you mean that we need to work towards "One True Linux"? Because that, quite frankly, sounds stupid.
Satya has overseen microsoft to be very profitable yeah, but they haven't exactly been the best company, buying a bunch of popular companies that most people probably would rather they not own, and investing as much as possible into making using windows a terrible, ad ridden, telemetry infused pain.
Likewise, no family has ever moved up the economic ladder by penny-pinching. The best that penny-pinching can do is to stave off bankruptcy.
Besides that, the polarization between management and 'the work floor' naturally leads the work floor to see someone who studied 'management' as the epitome of management, and thus as the epitome of 'the enemy'. Personally I believe the work-floor is right to be skeptical of the management style that is commonly taught. Because the style is not based on treating employees as humans but instead about extracting a much value from these human resources as possible.
* More productive
* Less likely to leave (which is expensive)
* More motivated to share cost saving ideas which can save companies millions of dollars annually.
Healthy companies can employ workers longer too.
A good manager doesn't need to know how to build the product. They need to understand their market, the company's strengths, make strategic decisions and create an inspiring culture.
That reminds me of a great quote and one of the most important takeaways (running the opposite direction) from The E-Myth Revisited.
"That Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work."
> They need to understand their market, the company's strengths, make strategic decisions and create an inspiring culture.
I'd say that's largely orthogonal to studying business. You need to understand why customers buy from you and what kind of value you are offering. An MBA isn't going to help or hurt on that dimension.
Similarly, studying business makes one aware of a wider range of issues and tools, and case studies allow learning lessons from others.
If an MBA doesn't help with those things, you should ask for your money back.
Pretty much every "Wow this MBA does a good job of running a tech company!" person has a story similar to this where they trained and worked as an engineer before obtaining their MBA.
Go read “The HP Way” by Dave Packard. It was standard procedure for HP to hire promising engineers from Flyover State U and take the best and send them to Stanford for an MBA. This worked really, really well. Until it didn’t.
I had to maim the Windows Update process to keep it from freezing my computer whenever I tried to use it.
Clearly right when the user logs on is the correct time to install updates — pinning the HDD to 100% use and preventing the user from accomplishing their task. After all, Microsoft is more important than the user and their needs come first.
…where is the improvement supposed to be?
Windows update for Windows XP got worse than that. It would churn your drive for hours, but not make progress. There was an update to install manually and then you were good.
But if you're running Windows 10 off a hard drive, you need to replace it with an SSD. Although, I guess you can probably blame that on Nadella, the mass layoff that included essentially ending the developer-in-test QA program was June 2014, and Nadella became CEO in Feb 2014. IMHO, quality dropped significantly since then, especially quality on hardware developers probably don't have or don't use (like hard drives and Windows Phone)
Microsoft gets blamed when users don't install updates and their systems get owned.
In either case, Microsoft gets blamed.
- in one case, Microsoft seizes control from the owner performing unwanted actions that make the machine not function
- in the other case, Microsoft didn’t do anything; people turned off a feature they can turn back on
There’s a difference there important to free society.
This thread started off with my customer complaint that Windows stops me from using my PC to play games.
The typical customer does not understand what an OS update is, or what it entails.
They know "man, my computer freezes" and "man, I keep hearing about this vuln/oh no I got my hard drive ransom'd"
Those are the people Windows primarily has to appease, otherwise they have the problems that Linux does.
Sure I have one, a few even. Yet I'm not "a suit".
I think it is rare to be passionate about product, when you are an MBA. Because your passion in seeking an MBA is yourself ( ladder climbing, status seeking ), and that path is not forged on sacrifices for customer service.
What about all the techie founders who have run companies into the ground? Most startups I know are run by techies. Only a small number actually succeed.