
The worst CEOs in corporate history - jrwan
http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/the-entrepreneur/business-leaders/2540261/the-worst-ceos-in-corporate-history.thtml
======
guitarbill
This is obviously a click-bait article, but did get me thinking.

Laughing at failure isn't good, but talking about it more is. Apart from CEO
compensation, which I still find ridiculous, I find the difficult question is
"were they doing their job?" Not if they were doing it well, but were they
doing what is usually expected of a CEO?

Hindsight is 20/20, and it seems to me a lot of failure and success can be
luck. So is there anything other than calling the market/future wrong that
makes these CEOs bad? E.g. with Miller, shutting down the acquisitions seems
like the quickest way to dissatisfy devs, and I'd argue an awful idea in any
case.

~~~
hga
Yeah, it's not of great quality.

E.g. it might have emphasized how much COMPAQ's PC quality dropped during that
period, e.g. two computers with the same model number and consecutive serial
numbers could have significantly different insides, which was a nightmare for
people trying to prepare for Y2K. So why continue to pay COMPAQ prices for
worse than Dell quality? (As I recall, Dell maintained a higher degree of
commonality in their PCs, although peripherals were just as or more mix and
match.)

Chasing after something different while gutting your core business is a common
failure mode. Apple was said to suffer from this to a degree in the period
mentioned, as was implied from the mention that Macs weren't selling that
well. The Apple II side of the company was not happy about being a neglected
and scheduled for termination cash cow.

As for Mayer, she just seems to be terrible at managing people in general, not
just devs. Besides really notable things like the meat axe taken to all remote
workers while setting up a nursery adjacent to her office, Tumblr's failure as
a successful acquisition is said to be in large part due to the precipitate
folding of its sales organization into the general Yahoo one, which had no
idea how to handle its rather different market.

And wasn't development neglected as well? One common fate of acquired units,
which I've seen first hand, is that their technical development plans get
canceled when they inevitably lose budget allocation battles to much more
politically powerful incumbent units in the company.

So, I say that unless a company has developed a skill at doing this, which
Cisco was said to have a long time ago, despite losing all that wonderful
synergy and eliminating duplicate cost centers, integration of a new company
that's successful into your company should be done with extreme care and
without rushing. "Successful" to distinguish from e.g. acquihires where
acquiring a successful team, but little or none of their previous products or
services, is the goal.

------
keystfinan
This article makes us learn a thing on what not to do when we run our business
even in a small scale.

------
fred_is_fred
This list is incomplete without Carly Fiorina.

