A company whose billionaire quits can usually get a millionaire replacement, without much loss of utility. CEOs get shuffled around all the time without any particular effect on the company they “run.” I think they mostly run lower executives, who run managers, who run lower/middle managers, who run supervisors who know something about what the company actually does, and run the people who do tangible work. The CEOs who get into the news for doing something dramatic to a company are the exception.
Anyway, if the stable state for companies is this, then there’s some important function we are missing (or things are going to evolve into something else).
You mean if the stable state is to have a layer of management on top of daily operations, and the management never mixes with operations? Yeah, although to be strictly fair, someone has to do the annoying financials, and those people would not be helpful to people doing other kinds of work. I think that’s just a way of restating the problem.
I think another part of the problem is that business don’t want to have a stable state, they want to grow constantly, which becomes a problem for an increasing number of people no matter how a business is structured. It never really surprises me when ambition gets businesses in trouble, though sometimes I wonder how they manage to make the mistakes they do.
Well, for normal growth it’s all right. There is, however, investment-based growth, shares popularity-based growth, that kind of thing. These are a problem, they just give the wrong incentive.
You’ve lost me on the precise breakdown of growth types, but I don’t think there’s any kind of growth that can be sustained indefinitely without fundamental changes to a business. If you sell widgets, you are eventually going to hit the limit to how many widgets are going to be purchased anywhere, by anyone, and then you’re going to have change something in order to grow.
And sure, I’ll accept that it could be all right to grow past the point where your business model has to change. Some businesses do spread into multiple fields and do reasonably well in all of them, although at a certain point it might start violating anti-trust laws. My point is just that “infinite growth” as a long-term strategy can go down some bad roads, regardless of how innocent the starting point is. Even a benign tumor can be life-threatening if it grows in the wrong place, and I think that can apply to growing businesses as well.
A company whose billionaire quits can usually get a millionaire replacement, without much loss of utility. CEOs get shuffled around all the time without any particular effect on the company they “run.” I think they mostly run lower executives, who run managers, who run lower/middle managers, who run supervisors who know something about what the company actually does, and run the people who do tangible work. The CEOs who get into the news for doing something dramatic to a company are the exception.
Sometimes. Sometimes not.
Anyway, if the stable state for companies is this, then there’s some important function we are missing (or things are going to evolve into something else).
You mean if the stable state is to have a layer of management on top of daily operations, and the management never mixes with operations? Yeah, although to be strictly fair, someone has to do the annoying financials, and those people would not be helpful to people doing other kinds of work. I think that’s just a way of restating the problem.
I think another part of the problem is that business don’t want to have a stable state, they want to grow constantly, which becomes a problem for an increasing number of people no matter how a business is structured. It never really surprises me when ambition gets businesses in trouble, though sometimes I wonder how they manage to make the mistakes they do.
Well, for normal growth it’s all right. There is, however, investment-based growth, shares popularity-based growth, that kind of thing. These are a problem, they just give the wrong incentive.
You’ve lost me on the precise breakdown of growth types, but I don’t think there’s any kind of growth that can be sustained indefinitely without fundamental changes to a business. If you sell widgets, you are eventually going to hit the limit to how many widgets are going to be purchased anywhere, by anyone, and then you’re going to have change something in order to grow.
And sure, I’ll accept that it could be all right to grow past the point where your business model has to change. Some businesses do spread into multiple fields and do reasonably well in all of them, although at a certain point it might start violating anti-trust laws. My point is just that “infinite growth” as a long-term strategy can go down some bad roads, regardless of how innocent the starting point is. Even a benign tumor can be life-threatening if it grows in the wrong place, and I think that can apply to growing businesses as well.