The CEO and the Three Envelopes (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The CEO and the Three Envelopes (2010)

kevinkruse.com

53 pointsmooreds46 comments

The CEO in the story had no clue what he was doing. But he was facing the same problem everyone has when the outcome of your actions takes time to manifest. Much too often society expects that results change immediately after a change in leadership. But the small changes a leader can make take time to ripple trough the organization and manifest in results. Often people are not patient enough to wait for this.

A real life example for that is Paul O'Neill CEO of Alcoa from 1987-1999. His main change was putting worker safety in Alcoas plants to first priority. The business outcome of this action manifested years later.

During the first 6 years of his CEO career the stock only doubled. In the 6 years after that the stock prize rose to almost 10x of the prize where he became CEO.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure if this big effect also was related to the Dotcom double.

It is an old joke, it has been told about Presidents, and various other figures.

Thinking long term is not something that is rewarded next quarter, in general.

This is a large part of why I've worked over half my career for non-public companies. I want my management making the best choices for the product and the company. Not what Wall St. will like.

If the invisible hand worked... yes they would be the same. Reality says they aren't.

So what's the practical solution to this issue? If you focus on the long-term but have no short-term impact, you will not be there to see things play out (As Milton Keynes famously said "In the long term, we're all dead").

My guess is you need to figure out some small wins along the way that make people feel good and stop them from panicking and tossing you (and all your long-term plans) overboard.

Very old joke. Here’s the role-independent version:

“Blame your predecessor”

“Blame the reorg”

“Make three envelopes”

So old that it's weird that the author would seemingly self-attribute it.

To add supporting evidence, here's something from 41 years ago where the butt of the joke was the leadership of Soviet Russia, and the inheritance was 2 letters:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/01/15/a...

A couple years ago I went looking for soviet jokes. They're amazing. I imagine google can find you some.

A bunch of them were great. One I recall,

American: The U.S. is the best! I can stand in front of the Whitehouse and yell, Ronald Regan is the worst president ever!

Soviet: Comrade, I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell the same thing!

There's a bunch, with varying levels of grim. If you're ever bored, it's a rabbit hole that's worth poking around in.

That was then. In 2023, in the USA, try standing in front of your local police department and explaining the simple, statistically likely, fact that they have at least one sexual predator working there. They will physically abuse you until you leave. If you refuse to leave, they will send you for a mental evaluation. If you still resist, they will kill you.

Even more reason to look them up.

Soviet standing in red square handing out blank pieces of paper.

Police come, and tell him to stop distributing protest flyers.

Protestors: Protest? they're blank paper!

Police: Comrade, everyone knows what's wrong.

I might have messed it up a little, but, you get the gist.

Humor imitates life:

Russia arrested anti-war protesters holding blank signs: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-protest...

But apparently this a thing in many countries, and there's even a Wikipedia article about this form of protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_piece_of_paper

Ah, to be in America:

>In 1970, Anna Halprin organised a "Blank Placard Dance" by members of her San Francisco Dancers' Workshop. They paraded, dressed in white, while holding blank placards. She explained, "...there were so many protests going on and this way each person watching us could just imagine whatever protest slogan they wanted on the placards."

It's nice to be able to protest with blank signs because you want to make a joke, and not because of fear of arrest.

They should arrest you for misuse of statistics.

Since this is a joke thread, I'll share one related to this concept:

The police catch a man trying to sneak a bomb onto a plane, and question him.

Man: I was doing it to increase the flight's safety!

Police: How can a bomb make a flight safer?

Man: Obviously I'm not going to set mine off, and what are the chances that there are two bombs on the same flight??

They told this joke about A. Mikoyan who survived all Stalin's purges which made him the oldest living member of the Politburo at that time:

- Comrade Mikoyan, you forgot your umbrella!

- Don't worry, I'll walk between the raindrops.

That makes me think of children's book I saw once, The Rabbi and the 29 Witches. The titular Rabbi convinces them that he arrived dry because he danced between the raindrops.

Funny, I remember this specific joke from my childhood.

My dad would bring home photocopied jokes or cartoons from work. It's funny to imagine someone making 50 copies of one of these, then passing them out around their workplaces laughing with their co-workers.

15 years later you saw the same stuff in email, fwd: FWD: FWD: Re: Why American is great

My personal favorite:

A man yells in the street: "Nicholas is a moron!". He is taken away by the police on charges of lese majeste (insulting the monarch). He tells the policemen "Please let me go, I meant another Nicholas!". The police chief replies: "Do not lie. If you said 'moron', you certainly meant the Tsar!"

Comrade 1: What are one potato say other potato?

Comrade 2: Premise ridiculous! Who have two potato?

This got me laughing - and I reckon it's because of the extremely high laughter-to-length ratio.

Has anyone formally evaluated joke effectiveness (apart from Monty Python's "deadly joke")?

I can't believe this is still up, but it's amazing: Russian lolcats.

https://rolcats.wordpress.com/

This is the most wonderful thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. Thank you.

I guess it's hard to be a "NY Times bestselling author and keynote speaker" when you have to come up with all original ideas.

Anyone who publishes a book with a marketing budget is a NYT bestseller. It means nothing.

Being able to get your book published and having the publisher spend enough on marketing to get you on the NYT Bestseller list means something.

What does it mean? Rich parents?

It means a publisher ranked possibility of a positive return on investment for that book to be higher than the books they decided not to publish.

There are plenty of techniques to reach the NYT bestseller list; new internet matketers pay famous internet marketers to tell their followers to quickly buy their new book, hopefully in many copies, often with the cost fully or largely refunded.

The book is usually about how to reach the NYT bestseller list.

I think the other version I'm familiar with is a Navy captain or new minted admiral - especially in the age of sail - someone who has to operate on their own for a long stretch. Looking around I see a bunch of variations:

- the CEO or other corporate leader - a government leader (sometimes specifically Soviet or British) - a pastor or abbot - military officers of various ranks - a distinctly non-leadership corporate role that can catch a lot of flak (sysadmin)

I wonder how old it is? How far back would envelopes have made sense? Do you suppose Ea-Nasr left three bullae to his successor?

I heard a similar version years ago as “blame someone, blame something, take the blame”.

I first heard that in a movie. Something about politics, blame on me, blame on society, write 3 envelopes…

There's a version in the movie Traffic (2000) that uses "two letters": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmpyjSW6WQ

This is how MBA bloggers get all of their "material".

/1/ Say something humane, play for employees' and shareholders' trust.

/2/ Lay off thousands of workers. Squeeze out a blandly sorrowful text and a few cold tears.

/3/ Take the money and run, don't trouble yourself about leaving any envelopes. But if you have a pang of regret and must leave something, leave your little plastic bottle of cold artifical tears.

It’s a story and punch line.

"move to the cloud" "move to on-prem" "move to acquisition"

Optional step 2.5, "Say AI on the earnings call as many times as you can"

Cash out, buy a yacht, leave WSBs with the bag.

Back-updated to cover 2000 to 2020: "outsource", "on shore", "blame tarifs".

"rewrite" "replatform" "resign"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Ballmer just opened the Second Envelope - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1391554 - May 2010 (65 comments)

When I first heard or read this I think it used to be years, not months between each time he opened an envelope.

We’ve become far more efficient.

To adapt a sci-fi scene:

> The CEO: You are here because your investment is about to be destroyed. Its every active employee terminated, its entire balance-sheet eradicated.

> Neo : Bullshit.

> The CEO: Denial is the most predictable of all stakeholder responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

Add to the final envelope: "Take your golden parachute and do it all over again"

> I first heard this joke in the late 1980s, but the protagonist was the Soviet Premier.

https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeEnvelopes

Add two more envelopes:

“Blame covid “

“Blame market conditions”

"Blame post-covid changes" "Blame pre-covid changes"

This bullshit business theater "recommendation" is a joke lifted from a movie.

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