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.

You are sooooo right on with this.

The top-10 MBA cult is awful. These are usually those people you knew in high school/college who were excellent at studying for and passing tests. Excellent at getting great grades on projects. Excellent at everything except building ANYTHING.

I think that the people who are best at building things that people want don't want to get an MBA. They instead choose to spend their time building a business, a piece of software, a piece of hardware, whatever. People are good at what they love to do. MBA people love to go to school and get pieces of paper that say "pay me I'm smart."

As a data guy, I have to go in and deal with these assholes all the time. I have hard numbers, they have hand-wavey MBA speak bullshit. It is probably the hardest thing we data people have to deal with: criticism from the "trusted advisors" who, due to the cognitive dissonance suffered by the executives who pay them loads of cash, are deemed to be intelligent when they really aren't. After all, what executive wants to admit that the man or woman he has been paying high 6 figures to advise him for months is actually a talented actor/mimic at best and an idiot at worst??

>"The top-10 MBA cult is awful."

SV technorati pretentiousness is awful.

>"MBA people love to go to school and get pieces of paper that say "pay me I'm smart."

As opposed to some "Silicon Valley" types that don't have a clue about what it means to run a business, and say "pay me with investors money, I have lots of users!"

>"I have to go in and deal with these assholes all the time. I have hard numbers, they have hand-wavey MBA speak bullshit."

You sound like you don't have a clue what getting an MBA actually entails. Your comment is full of ignorance and generalizations.

Where does this idea that "an MBA" made this decision even come from? Google is run by an engineer. Point your misinformed, misdirected, stereotype hatred elsewhere.

This community is getting worse every day.

"This community is getting worse every day."

You've been in "this community" for less than 3 months according to your username. I'm not SV technorati, and I've run a business, as well as been a founder in a non-tech business that grew to 150 employees. I know business, and I know what I said is correct.

"SV technorati" is itself a stereotype.

Yep, absolutely correct. Well, save for Nike, which was founded by an MBA. Oh yeah, and Apple, whose CEO has an MBA and was personally selected by Steve Jobs. Well, now that I think about it, Meg Whitman, the current CEO of HP and former CEO of eBay has an MBA. And wasn't Bonobos founded by a Stanford MBA? I think Birchbox was born by a group of MBA's as well.

Except for those and probably thousands of other exceptions, your logic is water-tight and well-reasoned. Kudos, sir.

But Apple's founder didn't have an MBA. You know, the guy that came back in 1997 and brought the company from the brink of bankruptcy after it's collapse under the leadership of John Sculley, MBA.