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

Few people remember it, but the same thing happened at HP. It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market.

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.

It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think.

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.

> proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think.

This is a completely unjust attack. Quite frankly, I have no idea what "MBA-think" even is. You make an assumption that an MBA making a bad decision is making a bad decision because they have an MBA. That doesn't pass the test. Would the same person make the same decision even without the MBA?

I always seem to get sensitive over the general MBA hate expressed at HN. As someone who spent years in web development before getting an MBA, I completely fail to connect to any of the insults typically thrown at MBA's on here. I certainly don't recall a class where we learned it's best to destroy 20% time. I don't recall ever being indoctrinated to the type of business thinking that is negatively attributed to MBA's. I recall getting an education on things like finance, economics, marketing, strategy, operations, etc. that weren't covered in my undergraduate technical degree.

I appreciate the developer-oriented aspects of software startups and Hacker News and I'm certain that many people have encountered assholes who happen to hold MBA degrees. I'm certain the degree attracts certain segments, I clearly had some as classmates, but attributing every business decision you disagree with as MBA-think is not a good approach.

This just seems like taking shots at a fuzzy construct for sake of taking shots and I'm not sure what value it adds to the discussion. I'd rather see legitimate reasons why removing 20% time is a bad idea for Google's operations.

I say this as somebody who suffered through getting a professional management degree as well:

I think the observed pattern is that we repeatedly see startups get kicked off, grow like wildfire, then turned into an empty shell of their former selves once the "professional management team" is brought in as they promptly kill off all of the reasons the company was growing in the first place in favor of short-term (bonus making) metrics that are almost never good for long-term growth and survivability.

It repeats over and over and over again and it's especially frustrating when you're on the inside watching outsiders come in as VPs who's only qualification is a top-10 MBA destroy unbelievably large numbers of man-hours of work and turn thriving companies into joyless bean counting husks.

I remember vaguely going through my own management education specific moments where I stood back and realized what a smoking pile of self-serving bullshit and handwaving the professional management industry had become. Most of what we were studying was full of vague and meaningless, but impressive sounding, aphorisms and pretend sciency/engineeringy sounding talk. Management methods were described like bold scientific experiments but constructed of the flimsiest methodology one could come up with. I felt like the books we were reading were consistently written by flimflam men who had no consistent measurable success and wrote endlessly about management theory with the structure of those late night get rich infomercials where they talk endlessly about they're going to show you how to achieve success, but then never actually tell you. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages of it.

I've since tried to purge most of my management education from me. The only thing it really got me used to was a sense of comfort with sitting in front of spreadsheets all day, moving around millions of dollars, and writing status reports.

I wonder what would be good professional management that is as close to general purpose as the old MBAs.