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Steve Ballmer Says Tech Firms Should Be As Accountable As NBA Teams (backchannel.com)
New submitter mirandakatz writes: Steve Ballmer has worn many hats -- as the CEO of Microsoft and the owner of the LA Clippers, to start -- and his latest endeavor, launched earlier this year, is a comprehensive trove of government statistics called USA Facts. Ballmer recently sat down with Backchannel's Steven Levy to discuss publishing government information, owning the Clippers, why he bought stock in Twitter, and what tech can learn from the world of professional sports: "There's no hiding in sports. How well you're doing is all entirely transparent, and there's no way to talk yourself out of a jam, or confuse yourself. It's hardcore -- you either win or you lose. Your season's over, or it's not over. It's just binary. It's the highest accountability thing in the world. In basketball, every human on the planet can evaluate your performance. All the analytics are available. Everybody can watch all your games or write about it -- the columnist knows absolutely everything that the general manager knows. Everything. Your individual human performance can get reviewed in a way that never happens in business. And every 24 seconds, I can tell you how good our teamwork is. That's high accountability." In response to a question asking if a tech company should publish everyone's salary and be transparent to the press, Ballmer replied: "I only worked at one tech company, but I would say, the opportunity to improve accountability in the tech industry is not insubstantial. It's different than Procter & Gamble, which got to show good soap sales every quarter. Some companies making money right now say they're investing for the future. Where's the accountability? You can say, 'Well, the ultimate accountability's the stock price.' It sort of is, but it sort of isn't. You can talk your stock price up. But you can't talk up wins and losses."
Any [mb]illionaire can own a football team, basketball team or a villa in France. How utterly, utterly undemanding and uninspiring. So they win! So they lose! So what.
Some billionaires do REAL things with their wealth for the benefit of mankind, like start their own space program, or fund cures for malaria or cancer.
Till YOU do that, Steve, you're just another one of the bunch.
...when he was in charge?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Where did Mr. Ballmer get the idea that he is so smart that people should listen to him?
I'm thinking that this whole train of thought came about that just like a pro basketball coach a CEO can throw a chair so the two endeavours must be completely interrelated and you can transfer ideas & concepts between the two and they make complete sense.
Over the years, I've heard of *many* ideas like this:
- Business is like hunting, if you don't return with skins, you've failed
- Business is like prostitution, you get fucked or you're the fucker
- Business is like a parent, you coddle, worry, teach and it takes years to find out if you were successful
I don't think Mr. Ballmer has ever appreciated how lucky he was to be at the right place at the right time - otherwise he'd just be some obnoxious nobody that people try to ignore.
As it is, he's just a rich obnoxious nobody that people try to ignore.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
"I spend 20 years running a multibillion dollar company into the ground, but now that ive spent three years owning the Los Angeles Clippers im somehow unaccountably entitled to wax propetic on the moral and ethical turpitude of the cloth from which I was cut"
Good people go to bed earlier.
Start with a billion dollars and invest in a company where he's the CEO.
Wins and losses in a sports league are literally a zero-sum game. For you to win, someone else has to lose.
That's not true in business and economics in general - it's not a zero-sum game (which is the fundamental failing of Marx, btw...). When you buy something, both you and the seller tend to think they "won". You got what you wanted at a price you were willing to pay, and they got the amount of money they wanted for what they sold you.