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Bill Gates' Management Style
replicant108 wrote in to give us Tom Evslin's fascinating account of working for Microsoft in the early 90s. "So you're in there presenting your product plan to billg, steveb, and mikemap. Billg typically has his eyes closed and he's rocking back and forth. He could be asleep; he could be thinking about something else; he could be listening intently to everything you're saying. The trouble is all are possible and you don't know which. Obviously, you have to present as if he were listening intently even though you know he isn't looking at the PowerPoint slides you spent so much time on.
At some point in your presentation billg will say "that's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." He looks like he means it. However, since you knew he was going to say this, you can't really let it faze you. Moreover, you can't afford to look fazed; remember: he's a bully."
The most important thing to have for any project is a CHAMPION. So if you aren't ready to champion your own idea then you are wasting everybody's time.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Taco, isn't it long overdue for that Borg icon to be retired? No other slashdot topic icon has that juvenile caricature. And Bill Gates isn't even the CEO of Microsoft anymore. He is the chairman.
That icon isn't even relevant anymore. It's time slashdot grow up as well.
No wonder he's ####ing good at poker.
Oh, go see 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'. You'll enjoy it.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
This is usually the problem within any organization - people with good ideas but bad presentation skills can either develop the ideas and ask forgiveness later or forget about the whole idea unless they can get the idea to someone that's a good presenter.
It will be far better management style to actually give constructive criticism, but that is also a lot harder.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Maybe you should've spent less time on the PowerPoint slides and more time thinking about how your idea was going to (figuratively) grab Billg around the throat and shake him until he said, "That's the best idea I've ever heard since I've been here at Microsoft."
I mean, shit, do you really think you're going to impress the CEO of Microsoft with a PowerPoint presentation, of all things?
I've worked with bosses like that. Presuming you could impress them, they'd never let you know it. They still tell you your idea sucks and that you suck and that they don't understand why they hired you in the first place. They wish you were dead, sock you in the gut, etc. They're bullies. That's the point of the article, I think.In general, however, I don't know if this story is an example of 'billg' so much as it is an example of asshole bosses, of which there are legions.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
msshill: "So Bill, this world wide web thing is really starting to take off in the academic world. I think it's time we started making our own browser and include it with all installs of Windows."
billg: "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft."
Yep, sounds about right...
This guy's the limit!
Sounds like he handled it like a teenage girl meeting her pop idol.
Only, being naive and not realising this was just challenge #101, I left, joined a small company which just grew and grew, then left after a difference of opinion with the CEO, then joined a startup which just grew and grew. Interestingly, our CEO is able to motivate people without a single swearword.
It's nice for Microsoft that it is so big and all, but (as Scott Adams notes somewhere, I think) all the really smart people prefer to live in Switzerland as compared to the US, i.e. to live somewhere where even politics is truly local and individualism is valued versus somewhere where the driving forces in society are completely out of your control and individualism is just having a different alignment of ballpoints in the pocket protector.
It must have been really exciting and creative to work for Microsoft - once. Perhaps some of the pent up anger in the founders, if it is reported accurately, is simply because, even for them, it's no fun anymore.
Pining for the fjords
That story of the Flood-fill rewrite makes Billg sound like a great manager. So does being the richest guy in the world...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Some people use this as a way to gauge the competency of the presenter.
Or he could just be an asshole.
Gates seems to spend more time cutting people down than ideas. When you're making a proposal to management, you need to be prepared to have it picked apart. But that needs to be done constructively and without making it personal.
It appears to me that Gates is trying to play 'tough guy'. This is a technique I've seen on jobs requiring physical strength but not much thinking. The biggest, toughest, meanest guy gets to be foreman. But it doesn't fit well in the white collar world. I've heard it referred to as 'Big Mans Disease'. I've seen quite a bit of trouble in my travels consulting for various engineering firms where people avoid a blow hard. When this person is in a position of authority, the organization can practically fall apart.
Frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft is able to hire any competent professionals who don't have some sort of self esteem problems given the culture that Gates and Ballmer have created.
Have gnu, will travel.
....is not an interesting problem to solve.
It's hard to argue that Gates' persistent bullying was anything but good for shareholders for at least the first 13 years of public trading. Even though the stock price has been relatively stagnant for the past few years, revenue and profit growth are proof that the company still has healthy numbers.
However, anyone considering working there needs to ask themselves what they really want to accomplish in life. Looking back, it can't be very fulfilling to say "I helped make that company successful. I fit in, by emulating the bullying, belittling style of my bosses all the way to the top, and now look what we've created!"
There are plenty of companies out there (*cough* [1]) who are trying to be successful while actually also having the kind of environment where you look forward to seeing the people you work with. Having hippy-dippy ideals creates plenty of problems, but they are way more interesting problems than the problems you find at a company like Microsoft.
1. Shameless plug
So you're saying her reaction to "That's the dumbest fucking idea ever" was to drop, unzip his pants, and commence with a hummer.
Innovative people can see the MS Management behavior, and wont work at that
place.
Google on the other hand is getting all the innovative people.
At least
1. He makes decisions
2. He lets you know what he thinks
Must fucking managers never do either then back-stab you into oblivion. No, not bitter. Not bitter at all
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I think that Microsoft's culture did represent a huge improvement over the status quo of the day (before IBM got knocked off the top of the hill). While Microsoft was (and I'm sure remains) very hierarchical, the brutally frank conversations that happened there up-and-down the management chain were welcomed, whereas in most organizations, people worried about getting fired for even the mildest criticism of their bosses. Free soft drinks and casual Monday through Friday weren't the norm when Microsoft was first started. Generous stock options for rank-and-file employees also wasn't the norm, and even though Microsoft wasn't entirely unique in this regard, they were unique in offering MSFT stock options, which, for a while, were worth *a lot*. So, I think they can be forgiven for thinking "if they can't take the abuse, let 'em work for IBM". It's easy, in hindsight, to wonder how much better they could have done by using the state of the art management practices of 2007, but not much more useful than to wonder how much more productive Isaac Newton could have been with a computer.
However, they have a tougher job now. Stock options don't motivate the way they used to, and there are very few places left that think its a good idea to require good CompSci graduates to come to work dressed in suit and tie, so there's no remaining competitive advantage in having a lax dress code. I really hope for their sake that the hundreds of old timer managers there have broken a lot of the really bad habits that have gotten them to this point, or else the next generation of stars they need to recruit are going to look elsewhere.
>> Exchange Server did more to make email a reality for corporates than any other product.
Not at all.
Many companies had unix-based email WAAY before Exchange even came out. Then when it did, some non-technical higher-up usually decides the company should 'upgrade' to Microsoft exchange.
I've been at several companies where exactly this happened and exactly the same result too: Before the upgrade, we had an email system that just worked, and never needed any maintenance. After we switched, we needed to hire a whole office of support staff to deal with the day-to-day issues of ongoing Exchange problems.
I'm always surprised how long its taken them to come round to moving back to Unix/Linux solutions, but they all did in the end.
This isn't comparable to what Gates is doing in the article. According to that Gates would tell everyone that their idea was "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and didn't really mean it. He was saying it simply to make the presenter defend their idea, not saying "you're wrong and we're not going to do it that way". In both of the above quotes Linus is seems to be saying that he's right and that they will be doing it his way.
Linus could certainly be more tactful with how he worded those things, but I do note a distinct lack of cussing and (at the least) less drastic hyperbole. And how about some context to those quotes? On the second one at least I found you left off a bit before that that makes the whole thing much less worse than it sounds: "In short, at least give the penguin a fair viewing. If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." I don't think it's unreasonable for Linus to be taking that attitude about the mascot that will define the OS that he created. He was apparently listening to input on it anyway, more than you can say for most people in that situation.
The appropriate thing to do when confronted with a bully is to either a) ignore them, or b) make everyone else see how wrong they are
Dude, I totally agreed with that one kid when he said being drowned in a toilet at the wrong end of a swirlie was, well, wrong. Too bad a) ignoring things rarely fixes them and b) having everyone agree with you that getting beat up every day after school is wrong won't keep you from getting beat up after school.
Violence is rarely a "good" solution to a problem, but that's not to say it can't solve problems, or that it never is a good solution to a problem. I guess I'm one of those silly folk who believe self-defense can be justified.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Bully? Disrespect for people's opinions that differ from his? Sounds like many of us hear on Slashdot.
I think it's because many people who reach a high management position within a company didn't get there by placing the needs of the company before their own career. At that level it's more about politics and self-promotion than it is about performance. I'm sure that these difficult bosses are considered great guys by the people whose asses are being kissed.
I think that asshole CEOs get more attention than equally successful CEOs with a decent personality, so it's easy to jump to the conlusion that being an asshole is a requirement for success. Both Gates and Jobs have made some major business blunders that were the direct result of their ego problems.