Alibaba exec trashes his own staff and customers, quickly apologizes The CEO of Chinese tech giant Alibaba's entertainment division fines his staff if they look at their phones during meetings – a little nugget he revealed during a speech that included insults sprayed at both colleagues and customers. The December 6 speech by Alibaba Digital Media and Entertainment Group CEO Fan Luyuan was …
There is a problem that nice CEOs are often less effective at driving a successful company than pyschopathic bastards. My skill set* has meant the majority of my career I've been in very close proximity to corporate boards. I've worked for some fun CEOs, some dull CEOs, some driven CEOs, some successful CEOs, and some complete R soles.
Perhaps the nicest CEO I can recall was a very, very competent senior manager, reputation as a real people guy, liked by all he worked with, and recognised as smart and experienced, and caring. Everybody who knew him was delighted when he was promoted to CEO of £6bn a year business with a huge national profile. Then it all went wrong. He lost his confidence, his skills didn't step up to the harsh realities of decisions like shutting down or restructuring under-performing business units, and he didn't seem able to project the essential two-facedness that a CEO needs, pretending competence, control, calmness to the outside world, whilst simultaneously fighting political battles internally and externally, and having to monitor and sort out performance across a large and complex business. He got shown the door after about three and a half years (albeit replaced by a different flavour of not-good-enough).
The CEO most fun to work for, with the most potential for their own career was a mad, driven, psychopathic Scotsman. Demanded loyalty but offered none, workaholic, demanding, unreasonable, unafraid of technical challenge or difficult decisions, not actually a nice person at all but exciting to be around.
* For a certain definition of "skill"
was a mad, driven, psychopathic Scotsman
I had one of those as a boss. However:
not actually a nice person at all but exciting to be around
The latter was very much not true. And, despite his delusions, he wasn't successful at all - to the extent that he got moved (mostly sideways) by the guy who owned the group of companies.. (we suspect that he got moved somewhere that gave him the illusion of control but actually had a strong management team who would succeed despite him).
He didn't seem to understand that shouting at people to perform *without* giving them the budget to actually do the work was utterly futile. We know he despised us as losers when reality was everything we were trying to do was failing because of his constant vaccilating, changing direction and inability to actually commit longer-term to a strategy that might actually work.
That company no longer exists.
Wow that's totally not going to cause a problem between the subsidiary and head office. And I'm sure there will be ZERO consequences if the subsidiary takes up the offer of the CEO giving up 3 months salary to the Subsidiary's team building. No consequences whatsoever! Because we all know that those at the top are NEVER petty, spiteful, and vindictive. No, no, no...
"For Fan, his comments represent a cultural clash – between harsh authoritarian leadership and the creative autonomy often valued in the gaming industry."
I know people who work in the videogame industry. I also know people who worked in the videogame industry. Those who worked almost universally left it because they were made to work long hours without autonomy. Those who still work there concur that they have both of those things, but are somehow into the videogame industry enough that they're willing to accept it. I don't think this guy is in the wrong industry. As programmers go, I think ones working on videogames both get and accept worse conditions than many others. This is probably one reason why he has managed to not understand how wrong his approach is, although some people have demonstrated that they can be that stupid without any reinforcement at all.
For decades now, the video game industry has had a reputation for overworking, underpaying and generally exploiting employees. Primarily because they can- there are countless naive kids out there who assume working in the games industry will be as much fun as playing the games they love and see it as their dream job.
And once they get there and the reality differs from the fantasy, they can always be told that there are countless others who'd be happy to have their job (because there are), and the general naivity, lack of experience and insecurity of younger people played upon to make them think the fault is theirs.
Eventually they'll get a bit older, wise up, become disillusioned and leave the industry for something that pays *much* better for a lot less work. But that's no problem because there are always more naive kids, and that's why the gaming industry has never had to change its attitude.
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