Nebulously bad feelings
2003-09-26 01:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chipotleThe afternoon at work was more than a little frustrating--an endless battle to run what should have been very simple queries. Excel locked up. Access locked up. Mozilla locked up, when I was trying to download a demo version of Crystal Reports, ironically.
This was capped off by a surprise all-hands meeting to reveal information that was supposedly very confidential, but which I see now has already been officially posted on company forums: CEO Tom Melcher resigned today.
Now, speaking generally it isn't necessarily bad when a CEO leaves a startup. There's a perception that people who are good at founding companies aren't necessarily as good running them, and there's some truth to that--particularly in the tech world, there's a stark difference between a company's design and implementation phase and the maintenance phase. For a company that's as big as an IBM, people can gravitate to their best location--visionaries can be in charge of the R&D group. For a small company, it's not always that easy. Sometimes "vision" just isn't what a company needs as a direction.
The flip side of that is, of course, that sometimes vision is what a company needs as a direction. While There's implementationhas been by a small team of brilliant people that's completely intact, There's original vision and design was by two people. One of them all but left the company a few months ago to work on what could be described in a non-NDA-breaking way as a related but independent project. The other left today. There's absolutely no question that the overall thrust of the company's product/service is a reflection of the CEO's vision and enthusiasm; this is, as he told interviewers, something he's been dreaming of since he was a teenager.
So the question is, is this the right time in the company's history to make that shift? Sometimes changing even a good leader takes you to great places. Coming from Tampa, I can tell you that fans there screamed loudly when the Bucs sacked coach Tony Dungy and replaced him with Jon Gruden--and of course, Gruden led the team to its first Superbowl in his first year.
Nobody would have described Dungy as a visionary, though, so maybe that's a bad analogy. You'd describe Steve Jobs as a visionary, perhaps--but also a man who fostered a terrible management culture at Apple. That led to him being pushed out by Jon Sculley, which of course led to...
Maybe that's not an analogy we want, either.
I don't know that this directly affects my position, but today as a whole left me feeling uncertain again. Earlier this year, a friend found himself both being uncertain about whether his supervisor wanted him to stay and not being too enthusiastic about staying himself. I'm particularly sympathetic to that right now.
This was capped off by a surprise all-hands meeting to reveal information that was supposedly very confidential, but which I see now has already been officially posted on company forums: CEO Tom Melcher resigned today.
Now, speaking generally it isn't necessarily bad when a CEO leaves a startup. There's a perception that people who are good at founding companies aren't necessarily as good running them, and there's some truth to that--particularly in the tech world, there's a stark difference between a company's design and implementation phase and the maintenance phase. For a company that's as big as an IBM, people can gravitate to their best location--visionaries can be in charge of the R&D group. For a small company, it's not always that easy. Sometimes "vision" just isn't what a company needs as a direction.
The flip side of that is, of course, that sometimes vision is what a company needs as a direction. While There's implementationhas been by a small team of brilliant people that's completely intact, There's original vision and design was by two people. One of them all but left the company a few months ago to work on what could be described in a non-NDA-breaking way as a related but independent project. The other left today. There's absolutely no question that the overall thrust of the company's product/service is a reflection of the CEO's vision and enthusiasm; this is, as he told interviewers, something he's been dreaming of since he was a teenager.
So the question is, is this the right time in the company's history to make that shift? Sometimes changing even a good leader takes you to great places. Coming from Tampa, I can tell you that fans there screamed loudly when the Bucs sacked coach Tony Dungy and replaced him with Jon Gruden--and of course, Gruden led the team to its first Superbowl in his first year.
Nobody would have described Dungy as a visionary, though, so maybe that's a bad analogy. You'd describe Steve Jobs as a visionary, perhaps--but also a man who fostered a terrible management culture at Apple. That led to him being pushed out by Jon Sculley, which of course led to...
Maybe that's not an analogy we want, either.
I don't know that this directly affects my position, but today as a whole left me feeling uncertain again. Earlier this year, a friend found himself both being uncertain about whether his supervisor wanted him to stay and not being too enthusiastic about staying himself. I'm particularly sympathetic to that right now.
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Re: I hope I'm wrong
Date: 2003-09-26 11:05 (UTC)Unless we run into some serious software problems, I suspect There will still be here today when you log in and for the foreseeable future, and even if we do run into problems, our on-call engineers, of which I am one, will be working hard to fix them as soon as possible.
Heh. As I described in my last journal entry, even.
Re: I hope I'm wrong
Date: 2003-09-26 11:44 (UTC)Hmm, making me wonder now if any of the bugs I've found made it your way.
Re: I hope I'm wrong
Date: 2003-09-26 11:47 (UTC)