
Preparing To Fire an Executive - jayliew
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/08/24/preparing-to-fire-an-executive/
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d2
This is right on - particularly the part about you screwing up the hiring
process, not the exec being at fault. I made assumptions about a level of
professionalism that I never assessed properly. I went through this a year+
ago and I hired the wrong guy. Unfortunately he took the legal language in
emails during the termination process personally - another symptom of the root
cause for which he was fired.

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lsc
>This is right on - particularly the part about you screwing up the hiring
process

really, I think this attitude is the best way to look at it when you have to
fire anyone, executive or not.

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davidw
Yes and no - it's a case of asymmetric information, and while you can do your
best to obtain more information (hiring process), you can't know exactly how a
person will perform until they're actually there.

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lsc
I said it was the best attitude for an employer to take, not that it was 100%
the employers fault.

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staunch
All this makes me think is that I never want to run a really large head-count
organization. The kinds of thinking and "work" he had to do at Opsware are
exhausting just to read about.

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roel_v
Very informative post. I (and I suspect many others reading this) regularly
have to fire executives at multinationals with several thousands in staff and
100's of millions in turnover. I'm going to bookmark this and the next time I
need to, I'll be sure to re-read this blog post - because every time I do
something like this, I rely on blog posts to instruct me on how to do it.

(yes yes I'm a snarky asshole - I liked to read it too, I guess in the same
way women like to read in Cosmopolitan about cocktail parties where super
models wear designer dresses and party all night every night drinking 1000$ /
bottle champagne and have affairs with billionaires, but really, when you look
at it critically, what is the value of this to anyone but the top 1/1000th
percentile of the population?)

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count
Where does he imply that this is only for huge companies? Even small start-ups
have executives, staff, and a board.

The lesson is the same no matter the scale. If you hire a CTO and then have to
fire that CTO, it's most likely your screw up.

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tedsuo
I'm not sure why the exec is less at fault than another class of employee. If
you hire a programmer or designer who can't deliver, how is that any
different?

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JamesBlair
Because the executive's performance depends on the team he's working with. If
there's mismatch between the executive's leadership and the team, that will
result in difficulties _regardless of his skill_.

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mkramlich
so if his performance is bad, it's the fault of his team. but if his
performance is good, it justifies the huge bucks they make. i sense a
discrepancy.

in my world, with greater reward should come greater responsibility.

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JamesBlair
Severance packages are often quite generous too. :-)

But the important point is that it's not about blaming people for things they
can't be expected to control. Firing incompetent executives is, as the article
pointed out, hopefully rare. But if they can't meet performance goals they
should still be let go: if a company was in this position with regard to
firing their employees, I'd be equally concerned if they were disparaging.

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civilian
My takeaway: Executives get fired, but N*&$!s get capped & bagged.

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cpr
His attempt to be PC and make the firee a "she" backfired--it sounds sexist to
have the failing executive be female.

Give it up, folks--just use "he" as a generic pronoun. No one thinks it means
you think one gender is better than the other.

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orangecat
There's nothing wrong with "they" as third person singular.

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Willwhatley
Except that it sounds terrible if one was brought up according to a different
light. English already has a third person personal singular.

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Todd
Many languages have unexpected pronoun usage that newcomers must get used to.
Many Indo-European languages have a formal 'you', for example. With French,
it's the same as 2nd person plural (you). With German, it's the same as 3rd
person plural (they). French also has the odd case of 'on' which, although
it's a 3rd person singular (e.g., one goes = on va), is very frequently used
as 1st person plural (we go = nous allons).

Where there is a missing component in language, there will be a cognitive need
to fill it somehow. It can be done with formations like y'all or with more
acceptable usage such as they. I think we English speakers worry too much
about this sort of thing.

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Luyt
In Dutch, there is 'jij' (colloquial 'you') and 'u' (formal 'you'). There is a
trend to replace both 'jij' and 'u' by 'joe' (pronounced as the english
'you'). This eliminates the dilemma whether to address someone formally or
not. The word 'joe' was popularized by Wim T. Schippers both on the radio and
in his plays and TV series.

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mathattack
Very interesting. One point on firing senior executives - in many cases it's
the first time the executive ever failed. Silicon Valley is perhaps the only
exception, but this is precisely because exits are handled well. Being good at
separations increases a company's ability to take risks on hiring.

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JamesBlair
Why is the rationale for preserving the reputation of the fired executive
first making yourself look good and only incidentally that it's the fair and
decent thing to do. The fair and decent thing to do should be reason #1.

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ethank
At some point when the statute ends I have to do a post about firing yourself.
I did that in January (in a sense).

