|
|
Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at 01:12:04 :
In Reply to: Re: the snow ball is larger now posted by Kaegi on Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at 00:12:02 :
The money men hate companies that are still run by their founders, and they hate companies that are run by engineers. Time after time, a very good hard-working engineer invents a good product and works his butt off for 10-20 years to make it into a commercial success with sales in the tens of millions to a hundred million range. Along the way he takes it public, and in order to finance his expansion is forced to sell more than 50% of the stock to outsiders. Suddenly the money men discover the company, decide that it's "underperforming", borrow enough money to buy a controlling interest, put their own directors on the board, fire the founder/president/ceo, and start doing the typical MBA things to enhance short-term performance like contract out as much work as possible, take the "R" out of the "R&D" department, ignoring research that might lead to a new product 10 years from now and just spend money on development of next year's product, buy new office furniture and force everybody to watch some stupid training program run by some management consultants, harass the engineers until all the good ones quit, set up big (short-term) performance bonuses for the mucky-mucks, and employ all the accounting tricks to move as much revenue as possible into this quarter so the CEO can tell some impressive lies at his conference calls with the stock an-alysts. I worked at one place where, after they canned the founder and got on their "high-performance" strategy, the shipping dock looked like the invasion of Normandy on the last day of every quarter as they frantically crammed everything they could into trucks to take stuff away (to warehouses, according to the gossip) just so they could say they met their forecast shipments for the quarter. Of course since the stuff really hadn't been sold, the bean counters started the next quarter in the red, and every quarter the hole got deeper and harder to lie their way out of.
Sometimes I think the Harvard Business School and Wall Street have done more to destroy American industry than the Mexicans and the Chinese combined.
Follow Ups: