[naasking]

> They also see their own future. So, what they decide for the company might actually not much to do with what the company does.

That's exactly what I said executives should do: set goals and constraints on how to fulfill those goals. You're just saying that companies can change goals, and that's fine. You just tell your employees that your goals are changing, so they shift focus to the new goals. You're still not making decisions for them other than overall direction.

[gaius]

I think what Wiz21 is getting at is that the interests of the company and the interests of its senior managers are not always aligned.

[naasking]

Sure, but I thought we were talking about what makes for good management. Bad managers either need to be reformed or fired.

[JamesBarney]

The big problem is that bad managers get their by sacrificing the company's success for their own success, and focusing on managing perception as opposed to creating value.

For instance if you were a V.P. at an mortgage company you could push your underlings to make bad loans. Even though in the long term it will hurt the company when those individuals default, in the short-term you will look awesome.

Or for instance when a V.P.s boss makes a wide ranging decision about the company will move in a new direction. For instance "To the cloud". You can argue about how that doesn't make sense for your part of the organization and have you're boss and grand-boss think of you as "Not a team player". Or you can cheer-lead a decision you know is wrong, knowing that afterwards you can produce some great powerpoints slides about how failure was outside of your control.

[naasking]

> For instance if you were a V.P. at an mortgage company you could push your underlings to make bad loans. Even though in the long term it will hurt the company when those individuals default, in the short-term you will look awesome.

Having metrics to measure success is of course important. While micro metrics like lines of code produced per day are easily gamed, metrics like number of successful projects divided by the estimated risk are not. For the mortgage, number of mortgages divided my estimated risk is similar, and would easily identify the managers that are putting the company at risk to game their metrics.

> Or for instance when a V.P.s boss makes a wide ranging decision about the company will move in a new direction. For instance "To the cloud".

Do you mean that the CEO is declaring that the company should use the cloud for all of their products, or that the company is to become a cloud provider? Because the former is exactly the wrong type of decision that I've been talking about, and the latter is exactly the kind of decision they should make.