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Comment by analyst74 | Hacker News Reader

I have a very similar observation.

My belief is that when you have a group of extremely smart and hard working people competing for promotions, the ones focusing on managing perception and relationships will do better than those focusing on the business or product.

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Big companies are all about politics, all the time, in my experience. Smart business/product decisions require many quarters, sometimes years, of discipline and commitment to pay off. Whereas a shorter term focus results in less headache, possible promotion, and guaranteed bonuses. If/when the company craters, you can just bail. The sign of a great executive is somebody who empowers their organization to think ahead of the next earnings report, and backs it up (and doesn't get fired themselves in the process). They're an endangered species.

It’s also harder to attribute something you did 4 years ago as paying dividends now. Heck you probably won’t have any people with context on why that was a good decision on the team anymore.

I joined two years ago so that’s just how things are done here as far as I’m concerned!

If the executive isn’t great, then yes the company won’t be great either. That, however, begs the question why you (one) would work there. Why accept low standards, average colleagues, meaningless work.

But perception and relationships is what will ultimately drive sales, because customers are people too. What's difficult is finding the balance between product, marketing/sales, and tech. An easy example but I find Steve Jobs really personified this, the marketing vision was an integral part of the product. The failure is favouring one over the other, and yes naturally in big companies the relationship people will take over, but startups too tech centric without customer culture regularly fail too.

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