

Ask HN: Can you tell a company's (future) success by how isolated the boss is? - diminium

Ok, I have this funky theory.  The more isolated the boss is from the from the rest of the employees, the more dysfunctional the organization is.  Basically, this idea of the CEO hiding themselves in a giant office results in the company's downfall because, well - they don't know what's happening?<p>I don't know if this theory is right or wrong but any takers?
======
JigSaw81
Don't confuse a company's boss with a company's manager. If you are a small
start-up, yes, sit in a cubicle in an open spanc and bully up the employees.
That works. However, if you get to a higher level, the more seclusion you get,
the better. It all becomes distracting and you need to meditate more in a
total seclusion to stay at the visionary path. Because you can't and shouldn't
react to all the "crises" occurring every day in a day to day normal business
operations. Leave it to managers and keep them accountable.

~~~
nostrademons
I think that even at the 10,000+ employee level, there's a very heavy
correlation between how open & accessible the CEO is and how successful the
company is. No, you can't compare a 30,000-employee multinational with a
10-person startup. But within size categories, the correlation holds pretty
well.

The Google founders host TGIF every Friday where anybody can get up and ask
them _anything_ , no matter how inane. When Lou Gerstner took over IBM, he
spent his first 90 days just talking to people and getting a pulse on the
organization. Hewlett Packard (in the 70s, before Fiorina destroyed it)
popularized the idea of "management by wandering around", where managers would
learn about how the organization _actually_ works just by walking up and
talking to people. I think there's some other company where the CEO makes it a
point to go and spend a day in each job function (eg. he answers customer
service calls for a day), so he gets a sense of what it's like to actually be
his employees.

