Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

Then "professional" management came in and killed the proverbial goose. They had to focus more on the "bottom line". To do what was easy to measure and track, rather than what was necessary for the next step of the company, and now HP is a mere shadow of its former glory -- directionless and bleeding.

3M and Corning have largely avoided this fate, but it seems that Google won't. This should make a lot of entrepreneurs happy, as there will continue to be a lot of top-down management-driven products that, if history shows, will continue to be market failures. Yet somehow, I'm incredibly sad, as it seems that too many companies go down this road.

I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet's the boss. But if you're not, you should be investing and thinking long term cause the other guys probably aren't.

I've seen a related phenomenon in the startup world. Watched it, front row seat. I did a stint in startup-tech-focused business consulting. If you have a top-ten MBA and connections you can raise millions of dollars, set fire to it like the Joker in Batman Begins, and then raise millions of dollars again, serially.

They were basically cargo cultists, mindlessly imitating the words, phrases, and superficial behaviors of supposedly-successful people and businesses. But there was no higher-order conceptual thinking beneath the surface-- no "there" there. They had no plan and no plan on how to acquire a plan. They got the money and then did a kind of mindless MBA rain dance until the money was gone. Then they'd raise more.

I watched them do shit like destroy products that big customers had money in hand ready to pay for when they were inches away from release. I mean a done product, ready to go, and better than anything else in its market. A product that they owned and had already paid to develop. The rationale was always some kind of MBA newspeak blather. I can't even remember it since my mind filters out sounds that imitate language but lack conceptual content. Otherwise I risk wasting a synapse.

But what do I know? I went to a po-dunk Midwestern state school, so what looks obviously stupid to me is maybe genius. I'm not saying I definitely could have done better, but I do think my probability of failure would have been <= to theirs. But there is no way in hell I could get what they got. Not a chance. I saw people try with better credentials than me and who were probably much smarter, but they lacked whatever special magic blessing the cargo cult guys had.

I'm convinced its pure cronyism and ass-covering. I guess nobody ever got fired for losing their clients' money to a Harvard or MIT Sloan MBA. Nobody with a degree like that could be at fault. It has to be the employees (I've seen really good people get blamed for following stupid orders several times), bad market timing, etc.

I'm watching friends in two different, reasonably large consulting companies (~700-1000 employees) suffer as their respective companies go through the consulting version of this kind of MBA suicide. In one case the company even decided to change their name and go through a rebranding. Some examples of the idiocy at work

- The rebranded company's schtick is to hire staff with advanced degrees (PhD preferred and multiple Masters) and at least 10 years of industry experience and charge bongo bucks for renting them out to do high-end but not necessarily mind-blowing work. Something like 80% of their contract staff has a PhD. Due to economic reasons they lost a couple medium-sized contracts. Their response was to lay off half of the PhD employees in the company because they were too expensive to keep around while they looked for new work. even ones who were already working on a contract and making money for the company.

This meant that they also had to cancel at least 3 more medium-sized contracts and a handful of smaller ones because they eliminated the staff who were working on them

At one point they also had two CTOs (because if one is good, two look even better) until they came to their senses and laid one of them off.

- At the other consulting firm, a similar pattern, tightening customer budgets meant that they decided to replace staff already on contract with cheaper, less experience, all new staff to pump up the profitability score on the spreadsheet. (they'd already laid off all of the idle staff not on contract, so without winning new business, some MBA thought that this was the best way to increase the numbers and get another bonus)

But now they've let go all of the people in the firm who had experience doing the work, sometimes decades of experience. And now there are no mentors, no experienced hands, nobody. The quality of the consulting work rapidly went down resulting in the loss of 2 contracts and senior positions that they'd normally fill from within required them to go outside of the firm for.

Both of these firms are in death spirals and all of the people that could help them pull out of it were fired.

At one company I used to work for, I also saw my leadership completely lose their minds and fire off all of the development staff, thinking we could coast with a new sales team and the product we had and pull ourselves into profitability. They also turned down trying to fill out profitable professional services contracts we had with staff because the margins were lower than selling new licenses. I also brought them significant new work in a different line of business where it was decided to turn it down because we didn't want to have to deal with low paid temp staff because "temp workers get paid more than their worth to their temp agencies".

LOLZ

I watched this particular face-plant occur once as well. When they actually got customers the results were hilarious. Hilarious because I was not a direct employee, mind you.

It was like having a high-end trendy restaurant with excellent branding, great decor, a great location, and no food. So they run across the street to McDonalds and order fifty Big Macs, run back over, dress them up on plates (who will notice), and...

Running out of money sucks, but this maneuver was destined to fail from the get-go. Anyone who knows anything about tech could have told them that. One smarter alternative would have been to lean the development staff -- they had to -- and hire a small number of salespeople on contract (not full time) and offer them disproportionate bonuses to bring in sales.

What they actually did was fire anyone who knew how to make anything -- and in a way that burned bridges! -- and hire a bunch of sales guys full time and at full salary. Hilarity ensued.