Balmer was a terrible CEO by nearly every measure, but the one that stands out for me is the culture he cultivated where team members would actively undermine one another just for a better performance review.
Under his watch MS missed the smartphone boat, waffled between consumer and commercial products, Windows Vista, Bing, stack ranking employees, organizational silos, pushed a know it all mindset (as opposed to a learning mindset), etc.
Balmer was a terrible CEO by nearly every measure, but the one that stands out for me is the culture he cultivated where team members would actively undermine one another just for a better performance review.
I worked under him. We gamed the system by doing a round robin of bad reviews with the understanding the next review will be a huge improvement.
Genius! I hope you did well there 🙂
Yeah, we did really well. It wasn’t until Satya came on and after a few weeks he laid my entire department off.
God that’s just a slightly newer version of adding loops into Mainframe Cobol so you can increase performance when you needed to prove you were busy
Honestly it’s sorta a known tactic in this industry. I got the idea from old coworkers at Intel. They do the same shit.
What other measure is there?
Under his watch MS missed the smartphone boat, waffled between consumer and commercial products, Windows Vista, Bing, stack ranking employees, organizational silos, pushed a know it all mindset (as opposed to a learning mindset), etc.
The next CEO did a lot of cleanup for many years.
Yeah? But how much money did he earn the shareholders? Innovation doesnt matter if your making bank already
His net empathy was -53647863919406 but it never went up, so it was not a usable measurement.
How much money they made shareholders.
I believe he was Microsoft’s single biggest shareholder, after Gates diversified.
https://danluu.com/ballmer/