[nostrademons]

> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy.

My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion.

At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.

[robotresearcher]

> the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy

Apple's Liquid Glass comes to mind.

The design exec responsible suddenly left Apple for Meta, a company rather less esteemed for design, and Apple still hasn't acknowledged this failure or backtracked.

[3eb7988a1663]

Admit wrong, from Apple? Was there acknowledgement of say butterfly keyboards? Seems on brand to quietly walk back an unpopular decision.

[egorfine]

> butterfly keyboards

Bear in mind that they forced the butterfly keyboard for years despite loads of users complaining. It took Johnny Ive to leave for Apple to finally fix the keyboard, that's how powerful the detrimental leadership can be at times.

[stogot]

Took them years to move on from their terrible keyboard design without a proper acknowledgement

[DANmode]

Unlikely they’ll be walking back the UX and UI changes specifically for their push into spatial and convergent computing.

[robotresearcher]

Yeah I do understand that. It occurred to me right away that getting people used to partial transparency might be explained by the difficulty of doing opaque drawing on heads-up displays.

[bombcar]

Apple has strategically retreated a few times but it always puts on a show of doing it in a “forward” direction. Look for much of the annoyances of Liquid Glass to quietly be lost.

[kranke155]

partial backtrack in some ways.

[etruong42]

This is also my experience at Google, and I have not really figured out the incentives. Plenty of people seem _perfectly comfortable_ with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars when nothing that they do matters. And it takes enormous effort to get anything actually done in the face of our enormous bureaucracies. I have a few hypotheses:

  - Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
  - Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
  - Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.

[RajT88]

I saw this up close once.

My job involves service contracts for the cloud. We get to know workloads and optimize them and learn how to troubleshoot them to reduce mitigation time.

I had a big customer go from "must have, non-negotiable" for my team to a non-renewal in weeks when a new CTO came in. Within a month, they had an outage we could have mitigated quickly and had our yearly contract pay for itself.