Posted on 06/26/2016 5:57:44 AM PDT by grey_whiskers
Yup. Deepak Chopra (not that one, the other one) replaced Alan Pogler as the CEO of United Detector Technology.
He grew UDT (now OSI Systems) into a global company with over 3000 employees and nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue.
Deepak is quite, quite mad. Sharp as a tack, brilliant engineer and manager, visionary and capable of inspiring loyalty, and being worthy of that loyalty.
He's a total character, I would work for him again in a heartbeat.
Irrelevant if their productivity increased. In a market economy, you must pay what the market does for your employee. Otherwise they can leave at any moment.
It can be devastating for a firm to lose a key member in my line of work. Yet so many don’t give a damn about keeping up with salaries
Good for you in a strong reply to a snarky comment.
Exxon is another that created a gladiator pit by culling the bottom almost constantly. For the winners it is a wonderful place. For the rank and file it can be pretty miserable. They hire the cream of the crop. People who have done well their whole lives and throw them into a full blown upper 10% of performers crucible. The winning credentials are not just smarts, they are some intangibles that you have or don’t have and if you don’t have them and are a lifetime achiever you self-fire. That is why there are so many, at least once, were so many ex-Exxoners who start their own companies and are otherwise VERY successful in other places that are not Exxon.
I work with GE, great technology support, engineering is a separate ladder and leadership from business. Business though, the customer does come second. They dodge and weave in the division I work with but the global research center people keep telling me this is not the GE way. I remain to be convinced.
The pay gap between the rank and file and executive suite is obscene. The executive suite is completely full of themselves. Their greed is endless. They remind me of a German Sheppard we had that would not let the horses eat the corn shucks. They have allocated themselves more money than they can possibly spend wisely and placed themselves on a pedistal. They make me vomit.
McKinsey? Why bring in a gang of long legged, bright attractive girls led by a personable and savvy executive suite schmoozer to take your staff time to educate the girls about your business and then tell you, the executive, how to do the job of organizing and leading the company you should have been doing in the first place? Pretty weak leadership isn’t it? How can the likes of McKinsey or Boston Consulting make your company unique and excel by giving you the same formularly advice they have been giving your competition? Who thinks that is a good plan. Hold up your hand. I have seen it all in action over the last few decades of downsizing, right sizing, flattening and destruction of American industry.
With their “new normal” I wonder what the X and Millenial generations will do when the Boomers leave? I wonder if it is possible to do worse? How will they lead and manage? I have learned that our normal, our perception all manner of things is from our experience and seldom from our learning. Even if we are taught history what sticks is what we experience. What have generation X and Millenial experienced that shapes their version of normal? To list a few:
1. Crushing low interest rates
2. Little inflation or growth
3. Regulation, regulation and more regulation, they see it as normal and don’t oppose it much.
4. Fear mongering of globull warming and how we destroy the planet.
5. Green programs for their own sake that do not have a cost to benefit ratio but “feel good”
6. X are the latch key kids, loners
7. Millenials are the team kids and everybody gets a trophy and exceptionalism is scorned
8. A largely warped view from pop culture and media of the family and man-woman relationships.
9. A nation constantly at war but the war does not involve 99% of them directly
10. A nation rapidly losing its identity by an invasion of dependents that don’t share our language or culture and borders that are disappearing.
11. Instant technology but decay of personal quality communication
12. Like this, the ability to hide behind the internet and become less human
What else is in their experience base of “normal”. Whatever it is is out future.
Your whole list is quite apt. I work with some smart millennials but like you say they have been trained to not stick their necks out or take large personal risks. Some are very smart and have the ability to reinvent the wheel and make it better but they won't. At first I thought it was because the culture of software development has changed, but it seems more and more to be the sense that personal achievement is frowned upon.
Facing the same, the lesson must be learned where we didn’t:
Pay CASH for you housing. Own it outright. That way “move” IS an option, always. Mortgages are evil (as Proverbs notes). Society need learn to not walk into the trap as a cultural norm.
Maybe you can educate me in the error of my ways but I see a WHOLE lot of change for the sake of change in software development and maintenance that adds no value AT ALL. I rack it up to the fact that if you hire someone to do a job they will do something because they are smart enough to know that if they don’t look llike they are doing something there is no job.
For example, banking software, it changes regularly, some of it for security but most of it seems to be intended to confuse the user by just reorganizing the page. That is probably very time consuming but accomplishes nothing.
One client I work with has an IT department that is noting but an impediment to work flow, I suspect most places are like that. How good can an operating system be that needs upgrades two and three times a week, perpetually?!
Personal achievement being frowned on, yes but also being the nail that sticks up too far and making waves is frowned on. Never ask too many hard questions.
The other thing that is missing is indepth examination of problems and solutions. Discussion is frowned upon and just hitting the tops of the waves is the flavor of the day. They seem uncomfortable having to play things back by way of interpretation. For ages one of my maximums has been, “Do not ask people if they understand, ask them what they heard.” The latter takes more time at first but pays big dividends.
63 years old, with a record, am Employed as a CAD Engineer refurbishing Semi-Conductor tools for the likes of INTEL MICRON, RFMD. Excellent pay, 401k, UNLIMITED PTO. Why, because I have been drafting for fifty years, doing CAD for thirty years and I am good at what I do. No annual pay raises but we do get bonuses. My last two jobs in AZ were pretty much the same.
“McKinsey? Why bring in a gang of long legged, bright attractive girls led by a personable and savvy executive suite schmoozer to take your staff time to educate the girls about your business and then tell you, the executive, how to do the job of organizing and leading the company you should have been doing in the first place? “
I agree with you 100%. It is the CEO’s job to provide the vision and hire an executive team capable of executing the vision. If a CEO needs a bunch of bright freshly minted Ivy League MBA’s, with no meaningful work experience, to create the vision, or develop a plan for his exorbitantly paid executives to implement, the board should fire the CEO immediately. Unfortunately, corporate boards too often fail in their responsibility of CEO oversight.
When I was working,I noticed that the only time the annual pay raise worked was when you actually got one.
Businesses keep doing things to piss off the public. Its bad enough they no longer offer pensions which now go into the owners pockets and a little left over for 401K contributions.....that’s IF they provide a measly contribution which most don’t now. They pay a whopping 7.25 an hour with no vacation. And they wonder why Americans are ready for revolt. Companies have done it to themselves.
And what do you do in the mean time? Saving 200 grand takes years even for the most frugal.
As for the other upgrades like reorganizing the page, the typical software dweeb is a cog in the wheel reorganizing because he is told to.
The nail that sticks up is a good analogy. Not only are the millennials taught to not out accomplish anyone else, but they are taught to accede to authority. Thus the vast majority of upgrade decisions are not made by accomplished professionals but by management, or committee. In the latter case the ideas of most inept team members are equally valued by decree and the new feature is then dictated top down. The millennials generally obey (except for the rogues who generally don't get hired).
The alternative which exists mainly outside of corporate environments is that talented practitioner comes up with the new idea pretty much by him or herself without second guessing and after much time "wasted" on bad ideas. Above all the managerial corporation dislikes "wasted" time even though that is often the only way to arrive at good ideas.
Too often fail in their responsibility of CEO oversight?
How about hardly ever function in their role of CEO oversight? That is my perspective. Maybe I have not been in enough board rooms.
Repeating you:
(except for the rogues who generally don’t get hired).
The alternative which exists mainly outside of corporate environments is that talented practitioner comes up with the new idea pretty much by him or herself without second guessing and after much time “wasted” on bad ideas. Above all the managerial corporation dislikes “wasted” time even though that is often the only way to arrive at good ideas.
The rogue is often fired or downsized out and becomes an independent. The best are consultants that author improvements.
Thank you for your explanation of apparent change for its own sake.
Ping on target, you nailed it.
And before HP, there was Lucent.
To this day, I still can't believe what management did to Lucent. For most people who aren't familiar with how Lucent came into being, the "core" of what became Lucent was AT&T's legendary Bell Labs.
Bell Labs invented (though some claim "reverse-engineered," from Roswell, NM) the Transistor. Unix (and eventually Linux) sprung from the fertile minds in Murray Hill, NJ!
And Carly Fiorina helped ride Lucent into the ground.
Mark
Actually they sold the last of their stake to Comcast in 2013.
So don’t buy a $200,000 house.
And that’s the problem: most people are so accustomed to the notion that houses must be that expensive because they’ve internalized the expectation of a mortgage so the market has of course cooperated by providing mostly homes so expensive you need a mortgage to buy one.
But you don’t have to. You can buy for much less; you’ll get less, yes, but you can own it outright and then save for an upgrade.
Go to Zillow.Com and search for cheap properties. If you’re flexible, you can find something at any price - even $1 if you’re willing to work at it. I could put you in a rural lot in commuting distance of a major city, with a functional home, for $15,000 cash complete in a week.
Work with reality and good stuff can happen. We’ve all bought into the marketing promises of mortgages and “must have” stuff. Walk away from the b.s.
Annual raise has been dead for a long time. Especially in salary country. Annual reviews sure, but they always remind those aren’t tied to salary, the raise cycle happens some other time, and probably you don’t get one.
When you get rid of the bottom 10% every year it kills a company. Sure maybe that year you get rid of a bunch of dead weight, maybe even the second. But you’re deliberately grading on a curve. Eventually that bottom 10% are actually good employees, they just happen to be the “worst” left. Not to mention how this kind of fear drives employees out, and the uncertainty distracts everybody through review month and kill productivity for everybody.
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