
Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO - salar
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/
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jdp23
Agreed that Google's facing a serious threat and that a CEO approaches things
differently in that situation than when everything's booming. I'm not sure
about the peacetime/wartime stuff though. First of all if you want to use
military analogies, Google has been at war with Microsoft since 2005 or
earlier, and with Apple for a few years as well; now they've got another major
front with Facebook -- and they're losing. It's a very different situation
than Intel's, so the CEO may need to have different skills and attitude.

And then the list of differences between a wartime and peacetime CEO is just
silly. "Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the
war define the culture" ... hmm, seems to me that George Washington, Abe
Lincoln, Winston Churchill all did a lot of culture defining, and so did Andy
Grove.

It's interesting though to look at the list in light of his self-description
that "One could easily argue that I failed as a peacetime CEO, but succeeded
as a wartime one." To me it seems like he's describing the CEO he became, and
arguing that it was optimal to become that way because they were at war. And
quite possibly it _was_ optimal for him and his company in that situation. But
going from there to "these are the characteristics a CEO needs when at
peace/at war" is over-generalizing.

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JanezStupar
I agree that FB is a threat to Google, but the notion that Google is loosing
just due to the inane valuations and hype Facebook has received seems a bit
far fetched.

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jdp23
Facebook's got over 500,000,000 users. None of Google's social efforts so far
have been particularly successful and some have been disastrous. So even
though I agree Facebook's over-hyped and the valuations are optimistic, I
still think Google's losing in social.

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JanezStupar
Theres a big difference between losing in social and losing.

Remember when MS was losing the internet?

Edit: Fixed the loosing typos. Not a native speaker here - so I'll blame the
spellchecker :)

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orangecat
Aaaargh. _Lose_. The misused "loose" has come out of nowhere in the last 5
years, and for some reason really annoys me.

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guygurari
This, this, and again this.

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cygwin98
There are some insights in this article. In fact modern time companies were
originally formed in a very similar way as military units. Although in
military when losing a battle, an incompetent general can lose his army and/or
his life, a CEO failed a company likely still took a nice package away.

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jdp23
agreed. there's a lot you can learn from "business as war" analogies -- when I
was doing competitive strategy at Microsoft I worked a lot with Robert Greene,
who sent me an early copy of a chapter from his "33 strategies of war" about
how FDR got his allies into key positions throughout the government in order
to transform things organizationally. It was extremely useful, and books like
Robert's and Sun Tzu's should be mandatory reading for anybody doing strategy
at a large company (or small company that wants to grow large).

But yeah, the analogy breaks down at some point. Yes, there are billions of
dollars at stake here ... but in the real world, soldiers put their lives on
the line and civilians get caught up as collateral damage.

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yuhong
For example, after some research I think it greatly contributes to MS's anti-
trust crimes.

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jdp23
In the 1990s it may well have helped contribute to an attitude where nobody
stopped to think whether business practices are anti-competitive.

It also contributed to some really horrible software. At one point in the
early 2000s I was meeting with Windows architects about one highly-vulnerable
part of IE that was causing all kinds of security grief, and the challenges of
rewriting it because its API was badly crafted. Somebody explained it like
this: "You've got to understand the history. We took a lot of short cuts
because we wrote it during a war."

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johngalt
Peactime CEO = don't screw up a good thing by taking chances.

Wartime CEO = Take the chances necessary to have a good thing.

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spinchange
I imagine being a wartime CEO is going to get increasingly more challenging
for public relations since the company is already so dominant. Even here on
HN, people don't see the urgency of Google's situation. It's not enough to be
on top. You've got to be way ahead.

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fleaflicker
Doesn't just apply to huge companies--startups need a wartime mentality.

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lawrence
I'm not sure about that. Many startups are either creating markets, or going
after brand new markets. Expanding / educating the market is more important
than destroying your competitor in these cases. I find it ridiculous when two
tiny startups in a market that the mainstream doesn't even know exists start
bashing each other. That energy is better spent expending the market.

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omouse
Today I learned, CEOs are like dictators or other leaders who dominate other
people. More democracy please.

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zyfo
Apart from a CEO shift, what evidence if any exists that Page will be a
Wartime CEO? The analogy with Jobs looks baseless to me, Google is making huge
profits and with 6000 new employees coming in 2011 they are hardly in a war.
Obviously they have their challenges, like being late in the social game, but
their core product is still unendangered.

The whole text, while captivating and well written, feels like a plastered on
narrative.

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ascendant
About 7 years ago Google was the rising star, and there were stories all over
the place about them poaching employees from the previous generation of tech
companies (ie Microsoft). Now Facebook is the "star" and you hear about Google
making outlandish salary offers to keep the best and brightest on board. While
Google is not at the level of stagnation and decay that Microsoft is in, one
doesn't have to really look too deeply to see that Google doesn't "get" social
and that's the world we live in.

I guess the TL;DR is: You don't have to be at the doorstep of "war" to move in
that direction. I guess Page sees it on the horizon and is moving to prepare
now, instead of when it's upon them.

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locci
While I agree that Facebook is commonly perceived as "star which smart people
gravitate towards nowadays", I really fail to see why that is.

Did suddenly all the techies buy in the "social" buzzword? I don't really
think so: what infrastructural and, in general, technical challenges would
Facebook be facing which aren't faced at Google too?

I tend to perceive Google as the technical innovator, bringing magic (1 gB
email??? watching the world from above??? and free???) to the real world,
whereas Facebook, despite it's cool API and Cassandra, is just vendor lock in.

But I digress: maybe the problem is that Google's already solved the problem
leaving no space for new ideas?

Why would Facebook appeal more smart techies?

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entangld
Agreed. It's hard to see Facebook's vision for the future. Is it their notion
that privacy is overrated? Google is organizing the world's information like
it said it would.

Most of the draw of Facebook is their 500mil users. I see popularity more than
greatness. Google has and continues to do amazing things (unfortunately none
of them in social).

Google moving into "social" is like a nerd learning to dance. With enough work
they can do it. They'll be awkward at first. Facebook is hosting the dance
because they have the biggest house. Facebook is good but mostly because it's
the biggest. They don't offer many reasons for users or advertisers to be
there other than "everyone else is". They can still become a lesser version of
their current glory a la Myspace.

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petegrif
brilliant

