Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.
There’s no other requirement.
You make the board mad you’re fired. You make the board happy, then you’re golden and can do whatever.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.
CEO at this level isn’t a people leader like you’d expect because boards don’t care about people (unless they are unionizing). So anything they say about people issues, you can guarantee is a statement made for the board’s consumption.
This fits that perfectly because what he’s communicating is “we got rid of what we consider dead weight loss because those people worked in what we arbitrarily have deemed cost centers instead of what we used to call [important buzzword like “metaverse”]
The easiest way to make a board happy is to stack it with your friends. Preferably those that are not that rich so that they appreciate the several hundred thousand dollar a year gig for very little work.
The average worker, adhering to Company Culture, trading their mental space and shaving off their own quality of life in favor of the company's growth, are not the point of the business.
It's not really about the board, Google has become a mature company that's not going to grow 20% YoY anymore and this is what happens to such businesses. Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces, they will turn them into IBM.
> Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces
Isnt the board the ultimate force, including the economic one?
You are supporting OPs claim actually. Becoming a mature company brings declining workforce morale.
> they will turn them into IBM.
because
> The CEOs job is to make the board happy. That’s it.
I think that’s too extreme as a blanket statement but it’s definitely true that when there are major wealth or position differences communication becomes difficult and all kinds of perverse incentives come into play.
If you wonder how, for example, George Bush II thought it really was “mission accomplished” in Iraq or Vladimir Putin thought they’d conquer Ukraine in a few weeks, the mechanism you describe is the answer.
“Yes sir. Everything is great sir.” Nobody wants to contradict or bear bad news.
The larger the power/wealth differential and the larger and older the organization the worse it gets. Older matters because it means there has been lots of time for these perverse incentives to take root. Large matters because the organization is too big for most people to really know one another.
This is probably a major mechanism of civilization decline. Eventually you end up with layers of leadership that become increasingly detached from reality as you go up.
It’s pretty incredible that primate social behaviors evolved for small hunting bands and tribes can scale this big at all, but they certainly don’t do so very well. The inefficiency and error rate is incredible.
Wilson rephrases the [law] himself many times as "communication occurs only between equals". Celine calls this law "a simple statement of the obvious" and refers to the fact that everyone who labors under an authority figure tends to lie to and flatter that authority figure in order to protect themselves either from violence or from deprivation of security (such as losing one's job)....
It fits the contemporary fad of contempt for anyone less powerful than you, including employees, courts (for some), etc.
Somehow, the world changes day to day, year to year, generation to generation; somehow we change the world; and all despite the fact that, as people now copypasta everywhere, 'it's always been that way'. Do people say that at work meetings? Talking to investors? One wonders what all these entrepeneurs and engineers do? No wonder funding is drying up (I think that might be a literal problem - the despair, pessimism and cynicism reaching the executive suite).
We've always had carbon in the atmosphere, warfare, poverty, oppression, ... and people saying that _____ has always been that way.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/23/google-quantum-computing...
The photo you linked to is only confusing because he's not wearing a suit. Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.
That would be different. In that situation it is clear who is doing the work, and who is providing the money.
But posing in front of a widget, he is signaling to the world, “I made this”.
What's missing here is the crown/suit/...
If society were very focused on worker's rights and the recognition of the necessity of labor, such as in an idealized socialist society or a society with a predominance of worker cooperatives in the economy, then the idea of having a monarch or CEO of a company standing in front of the hard work of people whose names are not mentioned and whose faces are not pictured would seem absurd. You would expect and indeed commonly see photos showing many workers in front of the item in question.
Just as an example I went to the wikipedia page for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it was quick to find what I would expect: a photo of a large group of workers in front of a dam they constructed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...
Or you might find a focused photo of a worker who is one of the people who built the thing, and representative of the type of workers on the project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...
I say this just to say, sure it can "make sense" but I think this is an artifact of the world we live in, where we have a hierarchical government and most firms in our economy are themselves hierarchical in nature. And so when the person at the top of the hierarchy stands for a photo op in front of the thing, we naturally accept that they serve as a "representation" of the output of the company.
But someone with a more worker-focused view would be more inclined to see that and find it off-putting. For the photo of Sundar Pichai up thread, I do in fact find it irritating that they don't even mention the people who were involved with the project he is standing in front of. And wouldn't you know it, I am a very pro-worker in inclination.
What did you expect him to say? "Yes, moral is low and all the good people are leaving" ?