[Legal] (fwd) Как "успешный менеджмент" ДиВов приводит к упадку отрасли

[Michael Shigorin]

	Здравствуйте.
Это не совсем в тему рассылки, но достаточно близко (экономические и правовые
законы вроде как взаимосвязаны?)...

-- forwarded message --
From: Andrew Stesin <stesin на tormoz.net>
Newsgroups: ukr.nodes
Subject: (fwd) Как "успешный менеджмент" ДиВов приводит к упадку отрасли
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 14:28:31 +0300


http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021024.html


The Case Against Professionalism
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How We Have Managed Industry Almost to Death

By Robert X. Cringely

Two weeks ago in this column, we were lamenting the decline of industrial
basic research, and last week, it was the decline of science at all in the
absence of threats like Hitler and Stalin. But this week, in the
culmination of our tragedies of the technical, we lay blame for both
phenomenae where it clearly and obviously belongs -- on the shriveled
hearts and addled brains of professional management. We have managed our
technical industries almost to death.

It is easy to forget that professionalism is the enemy of the high-tech
startup. If these companies were operated by professionals, they would
never have been founded. Nor would a professional tolerate the conditions
necessary for startup survival. Michael Eisner never emptied a wastebasket
at work, but I'll bet Walt Disney did.

Here is a scene that happens at some point in almost every young company.
The founder/CEO/technical visionary meets with his board and finds him or
herself out of a job. How could this happen? Well, the company has grown
to the point where the board feels that "professional management" is
required, so they are bringing in a new management team. The new team is
composed of old friends and classmates of the board, and the new team
costs five to 10 times as much, but that's okay because the company is
"hiring for growth." This new team cuts staff, cuts costs and outsources
everything that can be outsourced, with the result that earnings are
improved and the stock goes up or the company makes itself look better for
an Initial Public Offering. The professional managers get big bonuses,
they exercise mountains of stock options, sell those option shares, then
go on to some other, even bigger, job having "saved" the company, which
then stagnates, goes into a slow decline, and is eventually acquired by a
competitor.

In the PC industry, this is the path followed by almost every company. On
the software side look at Borland, Broderbund, Personal Software, Lotus,
WordPerfect and hundreds of others. The similarly afflicted hardware
companies are so many that the names become a blur. All these companies,
even though some of their names may remain, are effectively dead.
Certainly, they bear no resemblance at all to what they once were. And
every one of these companies had something else in common: At the time
their management was displaced, they were profitable and had money in the
bank.

So what happened? Well, in some cases the founders were at fault and
should properly have been replaced, but in many cases it was something
very different at work -- simple greed on the part of the financiers and
venture capitalists. Here is the same scenario from the perspective of the
typical VC member of the board. The founder is no longer doing exactly as
he or she is told. The company is moving toward an IPO or the stock is not
performing to the satisfaction of the larger shareholders. So the founder
is forced out, then his or her shares are diluted to make room for the new
managers, who are cronies of the financiers. This dilution eliminates the
founder as a voice of opposition. The stock price is pushed up, the board
sells out, the new management leaves, and nothing of the original company
remains.

Sometimes the result of the ensuing crash can have effects beyond belief.
The Learning Company, for example, pretty much destroyed the U.S. consumer
software business in the 1990s, and then went on to destroy the U.S. toy
industry as well by taking down mighty Mattel. Now THAT's professional
managment.

This is all a trick promulgated by people who do not in any way care about
the company or its people. But visit most any business school and what I
just described is taught in case studies as examples of good management.
It is maximizing shareholder value, they'll say.

Pity the poor MBAs, for they know not what they do, nor do they seem to
care.

In the last two weeks, I've been hearing from people who spent decades at
places like IBM and AT&T Bell Labs only to be laid off or have their
division sold. Some saw it coming years before, like the IBMer who noticed
in 1986 that the company was cutting back subscriptions to technical
journals for its library. He immediately began looking for a new career.
But most just felt an increasing ache as their company slowly changed into
something they no longer liked.

This might not matter if it didn't also mean that our long-term
competitiveness is threatened by such shortsighted action. Seeking
short-term gains, we have sacrificed not just the futures of our
enterprises, but also their characters. Often all that's left is the logo.

Here's one example from a jaded reader:

"In 1965, I went to work for Celanese Chemical Company as a Mechanical
Engineer. In 1971, I was transferred to their research center in Corpus
Christi."

"This center was never really noted for basic research. Instead, their
forte was to really improve a process that had been licensed from some
other company and also to figure out how to purify a chemical better than
any other company could. As an example, Celanese licensed a process from
Monsanto to make methanol. Over a span of many years, the process was
drastically improved and the improvements were covered with patents. It
got to the point where Monsanto almost couldn't recognize what we had and
we greatly outperformed their own plant."

"Each of our chemists was given a little time each week to work on
something that caught his/her fancy. One of them came up with a novel
approach to the manufacture of acetominophine (Tylenol). This led to the
extension of the basic chemistry and on to the most efficient and cost
effective way to manufacture ibuprofen (Advil). Commercial plants were
built for both and, at one time, the ibuprofen plant was supplying most,
if not all, of the North American and European markets."

"Hoechst A.G., who owned Celanese at the time, decided in 1997 that the
research center cost too much. They wanted to specialize in
pharmaceuticals. A massive layoff followed. The center was kept open, but
with a greatly reduced staff. Last year, it was announced that even the
little remaining was too expensive and it would be totally shuttered by
the end of 2002."

"There will be no further research for Celanese on process improvement,
new markets, cheaper ways to run existing processes, etc. If I owned
Celanese stock, I'd sell it because the company will be down the drain in
10 to 15 years."

Think about it. From the perspective of the Hoescht executive who decided
to close the Corpus Christi plant AND FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HIS OR HER
CAREER, shutting down that research center was absolutely the right thing
to do. It improved the appearance of corporate performance at a cost that
won't be felt for years. And when that cost is felt, it won't felt by
Hoechst at all, since Celanese has been spun-off and is on its own.

Does current Celanese management even know what they had in that Corpus
Christi research center? Probably not, because any sense of corporate
history has probably been lost.

We're lucky in the computer industry that the companies are young and many
of them are still run by their founders. I may not always agree with what
Scott McNealy does as CEO of Sun Microsystems, but I know McNealy
understands what Sun is about because he was there at the beginning and
built the first few Sun workstations by hand. Certainly, as long as
Microsoft and Dell and Oracle and Adobe have been around, there has been a
founder at the helm, and it shows. Love them or hate them, at least these
companies have identifiable characters.

And sometimes, that combination of technical expertise and business
success combines to create something even greater -- an organization that
has a love of learning for its own sake. That's what appears to be
happening at Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry handheld e-mail
appliance, where three of the top corporate officers have put $120 million
of those shrunken Canadian dollars -- their own money, not the company's
-- into the study of particle physics.

Maybe there is hope after all.

-- end of forwarded message --

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike на altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/