[PLUG] OT, FYI...IBM Layoff

[Neil Anuskiewicz]

On Tue, 28 May 2002, sendai wrote:

> I think you are have a good point about the executives and the recent stock
> market fiasco, but remember the companies that caused the collapse were
> primarily run by a lot of idiots with no business sense who had no business
> plan and got venture capital just by saying they were a high tech startup.
> Granted executives are generally idiots, alot of them do know business.

While it is true that many start-ups lacked a viable business plan, I
believe it is a big stretch to go from there to saying that executives are
"generally idiots" and it is also a contradition to then say that "a lot
of them do know business". If they know business then they are not idiots;
they simply have a profession that is different from yours and focus their
knowledge on different things than you. But I think you recognize that
overbroad generalizations such as "generally idiots is usually not a good
thing. :-)

There are pie-in-the-sky business executives who are completely
impractical and terrible managers -- and their are down-to-earth excellent
managers who really know what they are doing. I have worked for both (in
the form of small company CEOs/owners). I think most of us have worked for both.

> And this conversation was started because of the sequent layoffs, but that
> is onloy a fraction of the high tech layoffs n the region.  There are
> thousands and thousands more.  The advantage to having an employee only
> owned business is that the lower management and grunts are on the board.
> Upper and middle management is fighting for them as well by definition.
>
> Besides, you CANNOT have a large corporation without competent executives.
> Techs can be businessmen but only by exception not rule.

Being a techie and being an executive require different skill sets but I
will qualify this by saying that potentially the best executives are those
who spent some time in trenches of their industry as it were. They know
how the product/service works. It seems there are two types of executives:
the pure MBA types whose speciality seems to be management and the techie
types who rose up through the ranks or have an entrepreneurial streak and
started a business.

-- 
Neil Anuskiewicz
neil at pacifier.com