Monday, April 04, 2005

Scary

An interesting description of a company culture to be avoided:

  • You can't have a company that entirely consists of high ability people, you need a mix of less able people that the high ability people leverage.
  • Intellectuals aren't interested in making money, so a company built around them won't stay viable.
  • It's a harsh world where nice guys finish last - so you can't afford to be nice to employees and customers without an ulterior business reason.
  • High ability people can't collaborate effectively, they intellectualize and self-destruct.
  • Large companies need a strong management structure to avoid falling apart.
  • Intellectuals must be run by B students since intellectuals are idealist and only greedy B students are pragmatic enough to make real decisions
  • Doing things for the long term doesn't work.
  • Being transparent about economics and operations is bad internally, worse externally and certainly won't scale.
  • Don't reveal your weaknesses, especially to outsiders.
  • The purpose of being international is to take advantage of people in weaker countries.
  • Don't give production people powers that can be abused and hurt the company.
  • Culture is secondary - it cannot be a sustainable advantage - you need a superior business model

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Gerke! It's not all bad :). Thanks for putting me onto the VISA guy's book though. WGM.

Mon Apr 04, 11:09:00 pm BST  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What about the 80/20 rule? 20% of the people bring in 80% of the money. Likewise 20% of your time is spent getting 80% of the job done. I could keep going but henerally the 80/20 % rule applies to most input/output business models.

The motto is, If you cut the 80% slack out of a company be very carefull that you don't lose the 20% productivity needed to sell a good product.

Wed Jan 18, 06:13:00 am GMT  

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