I don't care a whit about this development technically. What I would like to read is a study of how this happened. Hopefully, BusinessWeek will have something. Heads should role among the senior business and technology people, not because they are bad, but to preserve their honor and bushido. Junior people should ask themselves why they didn't see this coming, or feel vindicated if they did. Probably 50% of the staff should turn over, but probably won't because that is the problem w/ HP. If they'd have hired me at the beginning as the Project Curmudgeon, I could have told them it was gonna go this way. Maybe. :O)
We live in an age of miracles, but when it comes to corporate effectiveness it, is SSDD. Just like the platform for the Singularity will be available long before we know what it means to be and to build a human, we will have all these cool pieces to build a company without much idea how to do it. Fortunately, the survival-of-the-fittest approach for companies works pretty well for investors, employees, customers and society. There are some current candidates for a survivable companies but it takes a long time to tell. My daughter, Diane, is trying to stake her design career on it, which kinda brings tears to my eyes.
Should companies have term limits for executives? It seems to be working wonders in politics.
At Ping Identity, I learned from the young engineers that they expected to only work 3 to 5 years at any company. They expected then to update their LinkedIn with a link to a demonstrable project, hopefully in the Wikipedia, building a bread trail of increasing relevance and coolness.They looked on it like going to graduate school. I have now realized that one aspect of my career is that I changed jobs relatively often for someone in my cohort. Five to ten years seemed to be about my range. Doing it a little more often might have been a good idea. I worked with all these amazing people at ACIW who had been there 20+ years. None of them could understand why the company had gone off the rails. I just shook my head. Fortunately some of the best have escaped and found a new job.
