Seen today on linked-in
“The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM [IBM] and Xerox [XRX], Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.This isn’t quite the whole story. It’s not just the salesmen. It’s also the accountants and the money men who search the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs or even eliminate paying taxes. The activities of these people further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.
Personally I though the canonization of Steve Jobs was overdone. From everything I know he was a bit of a jerk and he built his company and reputation off stolen ideas (Xerox PARC and the windowing system and mouse he "borrowed" for one), but he did understand consumers and had a passion for design and delivery. In my mind that gives his words some greater weight.
My father worked in sales for IBM, he traveled the world in the 60s and 70s, until he got TB and couldn’t fly anymore then he was management.
He always gets mad when he talks about the late 70s-early 80s, when the suits pooh-poohed the idea of desktop machines/PCs.
They said it was a niche market and they really needed to focus on mainframes.
So I would suggest it wasn’t the salesman doing that, it was upper management/bureaucrats doing what they do best, decide on a course (stupidly of course) and then proving how much power they have by staying on that course even after it can be seen to be disastrous.
In other words, IBM did was all big organizations do, became a bureaucracy and then it was doomed.
IBM is still a very big company and it’s still very much alive. Y’all must be using a novel meaning of the word “doomed” that I don’t know about.
I know a number of people who work for IBM also (I dated a girl who was a S/W engineer on the OS/2 project. She hates MSFT to this day). Look more carefully at what Jobs said. He wasn’t saying that the individual sales people were killing the company but that moving the sales people into management and letting them be the driving force will, or will at least severely damage it, I would say that your father’s experience backs that up veeshir.
Mitchell, yes IBM still exists and yes today it is doing well but it is nowhere near as large, powerful or vibrant as it was prior to the PC revolution. Another example would be GM. Yeah it exists but only because the government stepped in. I don’t think you can take the doomed talk to literal, as in they will instantly collapse. Some of these companies have operating revenues greater than the GDP of a lot of countries but they set the stage for death by mismanagement and bureaucratic inertia.
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