Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
Oh yeah, @thecorodon is singing my tune here:
https://wandering.shop/@thecorodon/111075315601088473
As someone put it to me once: “If a decision can cost or save a company $1 billion, doesn’t paying them $10 million to make that decision make sense?”
That’s solid reasoning…though I doubt the underlying assumptions. But…is it true? Could it really work that way? Well…
1/
Consider:
In the mid-00s, after the dot com bubble had fizzled and during Amazon’s ascendance to total domination, Best Buy had a substantial and rather enviable in-house custom software operation. It’s a lot to get going: not just hires, but a culture to establish, process, precedent, momentum. They had it. At that crucial moment, they had it.
And one day, they outsourced it all to Accenture.
2/
To be clear: by “outsourced,” I mean they took essentially 100% of their in-house software development capacity and handed it over to Accenture. People who’d been Best Buy employees were suddenly Accenture employees overnight.
I don’t need to walk you through the rapid disintegration, people going to the winds, Best Buy’s desperate attempts to back out of that Accenture contract. Use your imagination.
3/
By the late 00s, Best Buy was a company on its heels. They maybe could have gone head to head with Amazon, but the CEO made a terrible decision that set them back 10 years.
And here’s the point: in hindsight, it was very clearly a terrible decision. The kind of decision we supposedly pay CEOs not to make.
So…did that CEO get paid the usual gajillions? Or were they booted from industry, never able to find work again? Well…
4/
@inthehands
Mark Hurd was given $50 million dollars to leave HP “for cause”, meaning he’s broke the rules about reimbursement expenses (reimbursed for personal trips with his mistress). I’d have been walked out, not a dime, and likely legal charges. This after HP was nickel and diming employees, reducing benefits of every kind & reducing pay under his reign.
@mcnulla @inthehands …after which he ended up as co-CEO at Oracle, where, among other things, he narrated the required sexual harassment training videos.