A friend of mine recently quit his job because the CEO insisted on personally reviewing and approving designs. The thing is, as a CEO, he was super busy with other CEO stuff, so my friend could only get small time slots, like 5 to 15 minutes every few days.
Each time, the CEO would give tons of small, random suggestions, then disappear for several days before reviewing again. He'd request more tweaks, then repeat the cycle. Because of all this back and forth, even simple tasks that should've taken a couple of days ended up dragging on for a month.
In the end, my friend got so frustrated with the whole process that he just quit.
> We will become a faster, more agile and more vibrant company. We will eliminate bureaucracy and empower engineers to innovate with greater speed and focus.
It really is a weird PR piece rather than serious communication.
Nothing says fast and agile like asking your employees to spend 2 hours a day getting ready for work, going to work, and getting home from work. 2 hours sometimes means someone is going to have 0% free time in their evenings. I don't see how this is empowering engineers or giving them speed and focus.
Is that something a CEO of a massive company like Intel actually has the time to do in an impactful way? I'm no chip designer but a major chip design sounds incredibly complex and would require a tremendous amount of time & effort to review meaningfully.
I consult for large bureaucracies where this kind of thing is occasionally enforced.
There’s nothing more fun than a carefully thought out cohesive design that takes into account all business and technical constraints being randomly “improved” by a too-busy senior manager who’s been “off the tools” for decades.
“You should switch to NoSQL.” — a nearly verbatim quote from a meeting just last week. No justification or elaboration, just… abandon a relational database platform with two decades of built up business value on a whim.
I used to work for a chief exec like that. They’d see something on someone’s screen and demand changes, destroying months of carefully planned work with a single comment.
In the end, we’d build in ‘breakpoints’ - things that we knew they’d pick up on and want to change so they felt like they’d had some input without damaging anything important. This worked very well.
Apple worked that way; maybe it still does. If a product wasn't important enough for Steve Jobs to review it then they simply didn't develop that product.
I can assure you that Tim Cook doesn’t review every product. I seriously doubt he even knows what’s going on with half of them. There is absolutely no way that he used the butterfly keyboards and said they were acceptable.
Compare that to Jobs who after he announced the iPhone and started using it, saw how much the screen scratched and went back to the drawing board and had then re-engineer it before it shipped six months later. He even announced they were doing it.
Better yet, the infamous “what does Mobile Me suppose to do?…Then why the f%%% doesn’t it do that?”.
You noticed that Cook didn’t wear the Vision Pro once during the introduction? Compare that to Jobs introductions of the iPhone and the iPad.
Rumors are, that Cook doesn’t even use a Mac day to day.
On the other hand, Jobs didn’t use a Mac after his return until OS X was released. He was also definitely not a fan of the Motorola phone with built in iTunes that he introduced on stage.
Can you imagine Cook writing an open letter on Apple.com like “Thoughts on Music” or “Thoughts on Flash”?
This is what I wonder about Elon Musk. In retrospect, of course humans could build sexy electric cars, reusable rocket boosters, and ubiquitous satellite data services. But humans, or perhaps more accurately, corporations and governments, DID NOT do those things.
It takes an overwhelmingly powerful personality to get anything done, despite the fact there are billions of capable people on this planet.
This time next year they'll be spinning it as giving underlings more decision making authority to execute faster, blah de blah. All corporate speak for bouncing off the wall in another direction because what they're currently doing isn't working. Do something different. Anything!
“Major” feels like a weasel word allowing for any level of review.
Given the number of “major” chips Intel produces-weren’t they already being presented to the C-Suite? What stealth chips were being sold without high level involvement?
