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Linus Makes Business Week's Best Managers List
andhar writes "Linus Torvalds has made Business Week Magazine's 2004 list of Best Managers, where he finds himself in the company of luminaries such as Hector Ruiz (AMD), John Henry (Boston Red Sox) and Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks SKG).
The article lauds the influence of Linux on the server market and drops the names of such heavyweights as IBM, Dell, HP and Intel as Linux supporters.
Linus is quoted, calling all you kernel coders a herd of cats."
I think that managing a bunch of know-it-alls is a lot harder than managing people who are just there for a paycheck.
Might as well made the list. He's adorned by many people and scored by everybody else.
He's worked hard with a score of other people (who did not make the list) to make a nice operating system for anybody to use and modify. Before 2.4, it seemed many companies like Microsoft poo poohed the idea of how an open source operating system was going to work, and now that it has, they feel a little threatened. With the success of his kernel, I give him proper kudos.
Oh, it is kind of funny. I do not see Darl McBride on the list. Just kind of interesting.
Some call me Howie Feltersnatch
I guess that's the best title for what he does, but his position doesn't really fit the "manager" role to a T..
He's not anyones boss, he can't "fire" a kernel hacker, or direct them, he can just decide to accept or not accept patches.
That lack of "direction" is somewhat of a problem, noone knows where linux is headed. It seems to be veering away from the desktop to the server room, and locked down incarnations like TiVo.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Serious question - what happens after Linus? When he is bumped off by hired MS goons or whatever, who out of Andrew, Alan, Andrea etc will take the lead? And will they have the gravitas to be able to successfully herd cats the same way?
Sarcasm aside ,to the people who matter (ie, managers and lawyers) both of those are quite glowing :p
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
it's simple
Good managers, work for the employees. When times are tough they take their fair share of the cuts. When times are good they share the wealth.
Bad managers, blame everybody but themselves, and give themselves raises and/or bonuses for cutting staff. When times are good they give themselves huge raises, while maybe giving the rest a few scraps.
The wealth doesn't have to be cash either. Though it usaully is in the case of bad managers.
Guess which one Linus Torvalds, and which one is Darl Mcbride? All you have to look at is their quarterly reports. Darl's Salary is still a million dollars a year, yet he has to trim stay up.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
He's not anyones boss, he can't "fire" a kernel hacker, or direct them, he can just decide to accept or not accept patches.
But wait... when people are asked to name the managers we like best, we DON'T name administrators (which is the hire/fire abilities you describe and the financial ones implicit in that), we name our LEADERS. Linus made the list because of his leadership skills in accomplishing a task (herding cats, I guess) and the scope of control he must manage there; not for his budgetary or administrative skills.
Many people that have not gone to school have done good things...but if one sought a job sighting management skills, they are quickly turned down for lack of the so called degrees! This is despite the clear evidence that the so called educated managers have done more havoc than good.
Remarkable people can do remarkable things, often regardless of training or upbrining or what-not. But don't forget about the countless people without management training that have botched things as well. It is naive to imply that management training is going to make people less likely to do well at it.
The fact that linux sees more use outside of the states as opposed to within the states makes no difference to you, I assume? Why does an american have to be the linux maintainer? re-read your post and then think about how it sounds to non americans.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
looks to me like an arbitrarily-assembled list of newsmakers and "hot" personalities designed to sell issues. it seems nearly impossible to have much real insight on a manager without working in their organization.
As usual in business culture, all credit for the company's work is given to executives. See for example this blurb about AMD CEO Héctor Ruiz: "Nevertheless, the soft-spoken executive has put AMD in the black for the first time since 2000. He's giving larger competitor Intel Corp. (INTC ) fits with AMD's hot-selling Opteron server and Athlon 64 desktop chips, and he has set the agenda for next-generation PC designs." It almost seems that he's the only employee in the company doing any work. No mention of the engineers who, you know, actually designed the products AMD is selling so successfully.