Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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
Start with a billion dollars and invest in a company where he's the CEO.
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.
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.
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.
As he rides the team's fortunes further into the ground...
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.
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.
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!
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine