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And the sad part is we all know what the problem is, because its always the same problem (more or less) everywhere

Put Designers and Thinkers on top ... not project managers and follow uppers

Those who get promoted and run large organization are almost always not the smart designer thinker type, but the project manager, follow upper with a good spirit and cute time management skills

Apple also recently picked a project manager on top, lets see if i will be proven right AAPL close today at 666.8 (cute number) I think it will go back to 30 USD in half the time it took it to go up from there (AAPL was selling for 30 USD in 2004)

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I do not understand why you assume that project managers are not thinkers and have no vision. Are you considering Project Managers are simply mindless robots following a tracking sheet? That's very different from the project managers I have been working with. And project managers are, by definition, NEVER at the top, since they are at the working level managing upcoming projects.

The problem is rather the lack of performance metrics. In all the successful companies I have been in, there was a strong correlation between success and the ability to measure progress from month to month, from quarter to quarter and year to year. When such things are missing, then you are pretty much depending on the goodwill and expertise of all employees, and usually this fails sooner or later.

In someway I think we agree when you say "project managers, are, by definition, NEVER at the top"

What I am saying is, that when they do reach the top, and in many many organization they do, they use the same skill set that helped them become very good project managers to lead an organization, and manage the future of its products And as you said, by definition this doesn't work

What I am also saying, which is very sad, many organization structure their performance evaluation process around favoring Project Managers and eventually pushing them to the top

If you put only designers in charge of any kind of a project or organization, you just end up with a different kind of disaster. Look at GNOME 3, for instance. It was a design-led initiative. It failed to produce usable software, it failed to attract any new users, and it actually managed to drive away an absolutely huge number of existing GNOME users. As it stands, it is one of the worst OSS disasters we've seen yet.

You need a balanced team. That's the only way to truly succeed.

Anecdotally, gnome 3 attracted me. I now run a Ubuntu system, but I haven't switched my main desktop to Ubuntu because Mac OS X is still better (for me).

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