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July 18, 2004
Focus on the leader
Slashdot had a story yesterday with a link to Business Week's an article on how Scott McNealy's painted Sun into a corner.
This morning I threw out an old copy of Business Week with Scott sitting there grinning, back when we were making huge advances and the stock was flying.
The focus remains squarely on the top of the pyramid. Not that anyone would expect them to report on the likes of those of us at the bottom of the pyramid, nor that we necessarily make any difference either.
But it's somehow not quite right in the context of Sun to say the head guy is completely in charge, that it's either all his fault or all thanks to him, at least not in software. In hardware, maybe the whole 19th century organization as if we were an army makes sense. It software, it seems fundamentally flawed, which is why guys at the junction between software and hardware, like Erik Nordmark, once said to several of us who'd come to see what he does, "Ideally, we'd just interact directly with no management at all, based on the work we have to do."
We haven't been doing enough of that, partly because we have lots of middle managers who are thinking along 19th century organizational lines.
Posted by Mark at July 18, 2004 03:02 PM