It seems that “Non technical people don’t belong in management at technical companies” is an impossible lesson to learn for many, no matter how rich or credentialed.
There should be representation in management from every realm in which a company does battle on a complex field. A technical company should have strong representation from engineering, but it cannot and should not neglect lawyers in various specialties (tax, tort, labor) and include those knowledgable in finance, marketing and (when applicable) the supply chain. The members should ALL have "leadership" pixie dust. A companies leaders need to have insight and experience in every domain in which the firm faces either existential threat or growth opportunity.
I think the takeaway should be that if we want Western economies to keep growing, we need to cut these useless rich bureaucrats out and give power to the engineers.
Elon is an idiot but has a gift for convincing people to spend money building new things, particularly physical. There's a lot of people who could do great things if the funding was available and not just thrown into unicorn wannabe startups.
I’m convinced a long term successful business needs a >50% owner dictator who’s focused on more than the next quarters dividend payout. That sole owner dictator doesn’t even need to be particularly smart. They can play Diablo all day for all it matters. They just need to be able to make decisions that are longer term than the next balance sheet which the traditional executive class and shareholder structures are failing to do.
I don't think that is necessarily true. But if you are non-technical, you need people advising you that are technical and actually listen to their advice.
The problem with non-technical decision makers is that they will mostly listen to the MBAs who think like them and not the technical people. They tend to waste their time on stupid things to prop up their egos, compensating for lack of understanding of their business fundamentals and what direction to go in.
I wonder whether that is a more general problem. E.g., maybe technical decision-makers tend to listen to other engineers and not give enough considerations to financials and market expectations.
Check out X these days. There is this "founder mode" meme that is about company founders are the culprit of growing bigger and fix how the company works.
Imho this is bullshit. It is not about being the founder, but most people just cannot change their ways of working. Like hired managers would not be able with the same chance. At the same time, when founders or engineers cannot change to accomodate some business reality, only time will tell wether they can and manage to lead through that - or the McKinsey usual mantra "selling off unprofitable business unit" would have been proved better.