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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."
And he could not destroy the Clippers.
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And oddly, while I depised him at MS, I kind of like him as the owner of the Clips.
Seems to be an "everyman" type owner. Similar to Cuban.
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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.
Right place, right time, nothing more
This guy has always been an idiot. The moron who laughed and scoffed at the iPhone. And now he reveres sports. Ugh.
...when he was in charge?
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Steve Ballmer tried his best to destroy Microsoft, but it was too big to fail.
He almost succeeded when he tried to purchase Yahoo.
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.
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I just want to see that howler monkey impression video he did way back when.
Obviously, success is ultimately important, but in tech you gotta be willing to fail. Can't be afraid to fail. Technology is a very different endeavor than sports.
Look at the striking difference in Nadella's response to the AI debacle Microsoft had some months ago:
-- Inc.
in the guy that used to take Bill to strip joints.
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"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.
That USA Facts site sounds like an interesting idea, but the implementation could sure use some work. Navigate to the homepage and you're given a search box: What do you want to know about? "Search for some things."
Off the top of my head, I decide to compare the number of deaths by firearm due to murder and the number of firearm deaths due to suicide. And ... for the life of my, I can't figure out how to make it call up that information. Which is odd, since if you went to the original Department of Justice surveys from which this data is surely drawn, you can figure it out in a minute or two. There are tables that show precisely those figures, labeled as such! So why is it so difficult to twist USA Facts' arm to extract that data?
Seems like his data sources are sound, but his search engine leaves much to be desired.
Breakfast served all day!
... as a Christmas turkey.
Ballmer hasn't seen his name in print lately, is what this is about.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Ballmer has discovered big data. Great. However, he is prejudiced by a philosophy that in order for someone to win, others must lose.
The Microsoft way is failing. There is a time to compete and a time to collaborate. While Steve is trying to compete, others have learned to collaborate without him.
Luddites, luddites, luddites!
Circumcision is child abuse.
If there's anything a team of MBAs isn't, it's accountable.
Oh, wait...
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
How the NBA team is doing as a team playing basketball, sure, that's out there. That's something along the lines of how a company is doing in market share.
How the NBA team is doing as a BUSINESS is quite different. And that's equivalent to how a tech company is doing overall. And it isn't quite so obvious how to measure that in either case.
A sports analogy of some sort? No comprende.
In basic simple english: when you're a fan of a sports team, no matter what you say, no matter what you do, the team pays absolutely no attention to you - the consumer - at all. You could have box seats for the entire season, but when it comes to drafting new talent, they'll ignore your advice and get that idiot from Duke anyway.
And, turns out, that's Microsoft's business model. Ignore the consumer, what he says, what he wants. Just do random crap and call it good.
Can we, for once, focus on what was said and whether it makes sense, rather than who said it?
Anonymized quotes might fix that. Call it "accidental wisdom", if you will.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Hence "replied" rather than "answered".
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Spoken like the genuine sort of MBA idiot to whom the U.S. has handed over the keys of the planet to.
The Lakers are LA. Everybody knows that.
The Clippers are. . . LA? . . . Really? I've lived in LA for 10 years and never knew that.
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.
It might be a cancer according to him, but there is no hiding in OSS either.
Much of what he describes for the sport teams, is true for OSS.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I don't make crap. You can reveal how much I make if you want. Reveal management salaries instead.
It is public record, ever read an annual report?
Very true. They also have to disclose major shareholders (which are often management) and other big-price incentives such as option grants. Salary, after all, is commonly the smallest part of a top-level exec's income.
Here's the relevant excerpt from Ballmer's recent Freakonmics interview:
Sports teams and tech companies are fundamentally different - so spaketh the horse.
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Call them for a meeting and motivate them with a wonderful rendition of, "Dribblers, Dribblers, Dribblers ....". We need some comic relief.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So honestly, the comparison is kind of stupid. He wants things to be as clear as "wins and losses", but that's not how the world operates. When you have a well defined game with contrived endpoints and rules that are agreed upon, it's easy to find clarity. One team wins because we all agreed to an arbitrary set of rules that say the game ends after a set period of time, and whoever has the most points wins.
So with a tech company, when does the game end? What constitutes "winning"? Obviously, if you're stupid, you might say, "Whoever has the most net profit at the end of the year wins!" But that doesn't deal with the question of which company achieved more growth, or which company is better positioned for future years. It might be that a company didn't make much money this year, but they work they did this year will get them more money 5 or 10 years from now. That's not like a game. In basketball, you can't say, "I didn't win this game, but the play I pulled off this game will get me 100 points next game!"
He points out that, in basketball, either you make the playoffs or you don't. You won or you didn't. Achievement is binary. In tech, and in the rest of life, that's not the case at all. It's not win or lose. Honestly, coming in second is often basically as good as coming in first. Or really, more to the point, most of us will come in 300th, which is about as good as coming in 299th. Plus, a lot of people start businesses and run businesses because they like what they do, and achieving high metrics just isn't the chief concern.
It's kind of disturbing to me, when he says:
In business, you can say, “Well, I didn’t get it right, but we’re gonna keep working. Okay, we’ll improve that.” In tech, employees like to yak: “My review score—what is it? How much is this? How much is that? Did I do a good job? Let me talk to you.”
So he's complaining that, in business, you might not get things right, and then continue to work on it? He's complaining that people want to know if they did a good job? And if your employees were focusing on their review score, maybe you should consider that it's because you, as the head of the company, instituted review scores. If you set up a system of metrics and then base employee success on meeting those metrics, you shouldn't be surprised or put off when those employees want to know how well they're meeting those metrics.
Finally, the whole way of talking about it shows that he doesn't understand the nature of professional basketball either. Owning a basketball team is also a business. He talks as though his success as an owner can be determined easily with the binary metric of a win or a loss, but sports teams have a lot more to contend with than that. What about ticket sales? Merchandise sales? Brand association, licensing, fan satisfaction? What about maintaining good relationships within the league? Getting good players and coaches so you can build a better team for future years? I mean, is he really so dumb that he's measuring his success as an owner based on whether his team won the last game, or whether his team makes it to the playoffs?
Really, people should not listen to this man.
the columnist knows absolutely everything that the general manager knows
Not even close. Does a columnist know detailed injury info that isn't released to the public, what went on at the practice that is closed to the public, or what the coaching strategy (and how well the players are following it) was?
A reporter can see the in-game performances, but there is more to any sport then just the games themselves.
file:
He was a spectacularly awful CEO of Microsoft.
He managed to bring on board a successor who was less spectacular, but every bit as awful.
As to his monetary situation. He's just a chump who was in the right place at the right time around the right people. You can't depend on luck.
Why the hell would ANYONE in their right mind listen to him?
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Where in the world does he think having the teams winning record being available makes it accountable? Just because everyone knows if his basketball team loses 10 games in a row it doesn't hold the people responsible for the losses to account and it certainly doesn't fix the problem. Accountability is taking responsibility for how things are. I don't see many coaches that get fired give up the remaining money on their contract. How many players give some of their money back for having a bad year? No matter what the players get paid. It doesn't matter if the team wins the league or comes in last they get the same amount of money (unless there's bonuses). If the team gets blown out at home do the fans get their tickets refunded for the bad performance? Of course not. That would be accountability.
I think Ballmer saw account in the word and thought it was like accounting.
Steve Ballmer tried his best to destroy Microsoft, but it was too big to fail.
If he was made CHAIRman he definitely would have succeeded!
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