CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place.
I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
> It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t ... I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job.
But... that is kinda the job? CEOs are, first and foremost, the public face of the company. They're the one who talk to VCs / banks, regulators, major customers, the press. They're very highly paid PR reps / fall guys that shield everyone else, including the board of directors and all the VPs and SVPs, if something goes wrong.
For most companies, especially large companies, it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering, business development, etc. That, at least in principle, can be handled by other parts of the hierarchy.
> it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering
If you are the CEO of a company, you should have expertise in whatever your company does, and If your company is primarily a software company, then you should have expertise in software engineering. You cannot effectively manage something that you don't understand.
> CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases.
I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships.
Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills of a CEO.
Knowing which ass to kiss at the right time is an important skill not everyone has.
Kissing ass: $1
Knowing which ass(es) to kiss when: $9,999,999
And that's how CEOs justify their exorbitant compensation
I wonder if business schools could ever start actually teaching this skill. So far they just largely operate as scams, held up purely by prestige and network value
The "network value" of a business school could be reinterpreted as "can the business school introduce you to some of the right people's asses to kiss"
not a skill i'm interested in, lol..
I’ve worked with CEOs in multiple large companies. I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst enemy. Nonetheless, someone needs to do that job and the intersection of difficulty and masochism is beyond what most people can do or endure. Many people try and fail. Their job, at the end of the day, is to eat an endless stream of shit sandwiches with a smile and a plan.
Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck. Yeah, they have to make decisions, but that isn’t the part that makes the job difficult. That role takes an insane toll on the human spirit, and very few can do it for any length of time.
The cush job is often being CEO adjacent. You get most of the perks but also avoid most of the emotional abuse and drama.
This feels too soft. Each of these things has truth in it, but isn't some of this self-created? Where are these shit sandwiches coming from? A lot of these problems are the result of overpromising, breaking rules and skirting regulations, underestimating the difficulty of things they have no expertise with, asking people to solve problems with no resources, hiring more chefs rather than more cooks and dishwashers, of mismatches between good profitable product and exec exit. The idea that it makes sense for the CEO's (or really any leader's) core competency to be absorbing drama and pain is something we should think more about. Sometimes you hear that a good manager blocks and shields for their team, you have to wonder why the team always needs so much protection from their own company and processes.
Thank you for busting the myth of worker self-management.
> Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck.
So it self selects for sociopaths. Good to know
You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!
I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc.
However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops.
There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using.
I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.
If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies.
If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.
This seems hard to tease out from the fact that a) the majority of companies do not survive, b) the large, large majority of companies that do survive do not wind up being large or innovative, and c) there are far fewer coops than regular companies. If you assume equal chance of success between them, you’d still see vanishingly small numbers of large, innovative coops, because a small percentage of a small number is small.
Coops can definitely succeed and even dominate at large scales with some minimum government protections. The largest dairy producer in the world is a coop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you.
What are the concrete benefits?
Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees?
Coops tend to have better aligned incentives for employees on every step of the ladder. They'll tend to be more conservative about R&D but ensure that money that's being spent is being productive for the continuing health of the company since instead of that budget being "corporate's money pile" it's your potential profit share.
I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to the investment in the company's future being a sort of central tenant of their attractiveness.
Any data to support those claims?
Not usually the kind of data that the greediest capitalists would appreciate.
There are some case studies here, but it's only one professor in a largely non-capitalist approach overall:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooperative/comments/1bm5s5s/richar...
Generally, yes. Also the gap between the employee and executive class is a lot smaller instead of unnaturally inflated like it is in most private equity companies.
In software I can imagine a worker-owned consultancy, but not a product company. It would imply staying in one place working on one product for your whole life, which doesn't sound inspiring
A company need not be a single product, and working in a worker-owned cooperative need not be a lifetime commitment to a single firm (though cooperatives ideally will have less turnover than firms owned by capital separated from labor.)
No, it implies that you give workers the means to dictate the direction of the company. That is what workplace democracy does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.
If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them).
Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer.
With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want?
Where’s your real world evidence of all these benefits of coops?
Because I would love for it to be true.
Well workplace democracy has only been tried in a few corporations. If you want an interesting business case look into Semco Partners in Brazil:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8...
There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you look at our current neoliberal hellscape, it's pretty hard to imagine it doing worse. Also neoliberalism wasn't really "tried" either, it was thrusted upon us by a group of individuals that wanted it.
One thing to keep in mind is that society can change quite quickly if you want it to. I'm sure the children that died working in factories during the 1800s never imagined such a society where children are valued, cared for, educated, and protected but it did happen.
It has happen before and it can happen again. It only happened because people were willing to fight for it.
The rules are allowed to be changed at anytime if we deem so, a better world is possible.
“We are sure it will work because it’s never been tried!”
I believe the Germans have had success with including labor representatives on corporate boards. Maybe we can start there.
This is a shallow dismissal of GP’s point. The point is more, “we aren’t sure it won’t work because it has never been tried,” which is much less of a straw man to argue with.
No.
There was an unequivocal claim that it will work better than our current system.
They said
“Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.”
That sounds more like there’s no evidence that it won’t work than an unequivocal claim that it will.
Well... there is historical evidence that centrally planned dictatorships are not a very responsive form of government.
Now, corporations usually have the problem of competition, so if they aren't responsive (or at least responsive enough), they get out-competed by those that are. Is that enough to make them different from governments? Perhaps, but I don't know.
If you don't think there are competitions in dictatorships you are extremely sheltered. The competition in a dictatorship is whether you stay alive or not, just like in a corporation is whether you become homeless and die or keep a roof over your head.
That's just neoliberalism baby!
Could you quote that? I don’t see it.
Why does this argument never apply to neoliberalism?
That was never put to a vote but it still thrusted upon a country where the results are what you would expect: the worse income inequality ever seen in the history of the nation, life expectancy has increased, deaths of despair have reached record highs, more children go to bed hungry, healthcare is being ripped from civilians, and corporations are legally allowed to poison and kill civilians (health insurance companies with their death panels, manufacturers causing cancer valleys) with zero legal repercussions.
So yeah maybe we should actually go the extreme into the other direction, if democracy is good enough to lead nations it's good enough to run businesses. If you're a worker IDK how you would argue otherwise. Being able to keep your boss/leadership accountable by voting for them out seems like a win for every workplace metric imaginable.
Imagine how better of a company Meta would be if Zuckerberg wasn't allowed to waste billions accomplishing nothing. In a just society he would have been voted out, but in a neoliberal society he is granted an insurmountable amount of wealth.
I'm sorry but this society sucks and acting like we can't do better, be better is beyond pathetic.
Don’t you still need someone to make high level decisions?
Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.
No, look at functioning democracies. They don't need authoritarian rulers, only those that want to be authoritarians argue elsewise.
> They don't need authoritarian rulers
Yet they seem still inclined to elect them.
Maybe, but not necessarily for this reason. Even in a worker-owned coop, someone sets the overall direction. And how is that person going to be selected? It's still going to be largely politics.
Politics among the workers vs politics among the shareholders.
So, we live in the economy where everything is done by labour that receive minimal acceptable wages, while all the profits are collected by the ruling class who do nothing except constantly kissing each other asses.