mistersnrub - June 13, 2010 | 9:06 am · Link

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the worst op-ed in the history of mankind:

Justice Clarence Thomas seems bored. Why doesn’t he run for president in 2012?

mai naem - June 13, 2010 | 9:20 am · Link

@mistersnrub: I can’t quite make out if the op=ed’s for real or snark but I think it’s an excellent idea. Thomas, a right wing nut, gives up a SC seat for Obama to reappoint to. There is no way, no how a black man would make it out of a Repub primary especially a black man who’s married to a white woman.

Belafon (formerly anonevent) - June 13, 2010 | 9:26 am · Link

Come on, if you can’t judge a leader by how expensive his suit is and how short his hair is, or how short her skirt is, then you’d have to look at his abilities, and that would be hard for these board directors.

gnomedad - June 13, 2010 | 9:37 am · Link

Titans of industry who drive their companies into the ditch apologize rarely and rationalize often

Heh. And now Carly Fiorina wants to do for America what she did for HP.

Tom Levenson - June 13, 2010 | 9:51 am · Link

I wonder, in a rubbernecking a 216 car pileup on the I 80 east of Vallejo kind of way, how it feels for characters like Scully to know, somewhere deep in their remnants of souls, that they are the punchline to one of those “worst ever…” bar jokes.

I can’t imagine they ever have an uninterrupted night’s sleep; sometime around 3 a.m. every morning going “I did what?”*

Meanwhile, completely o/t—I’m listening to Garrison Keillor read Yeats “The Second Coming,” on The Writer’s Workshop on NPR. Amazing how he can take one of the most astonishingly bravura and almost cliche familiar works in the English language and render it as flat and still and lifeless as a former armadillo on I-10.** Now that’s talent.

*Not that they would ever speak such a thought in the hours of full consciousness of course. Can you imagine the effort required to maintain that waking denial for two decades and more? These are lives I’m glad I don’t have to lead.

**Gotta roll with the highway metaphor when you got it, no?

Mr Furious - June 13, 2010 | 10:04 am · Link

Sculley knew waaay ahead of time that Jobs and Apple were only going to produce overpriced and overrated “shiny” crap that could be purchased for FAARRRR less from their imitators months or years later.

pablo - June 13, 2010 | 10:12 am · Link

It’s in their DNA, literally.
Once an authoritarian, always an authoritarian.
That’s why Republicans and their followers are also loathe to apologize for anything.
It’s genetic arrogance.

WereBear - June 13, 2010 | 10:14 am · Link

@Tom Levenson: Can you imagine the effort required to maintain that waking denial for two decades and more?

An extraordinary point. I think it explains their trouble with rational thought; so many brain cells already occupied.

Daddy-O - June 13, 2010 | 10:15 am · Link

Let’s get it straight, and for the record, IIRC: “Dirty Fucking Hippies” was coined by Atrios, was it not? That’s the first place I remember reading it.

It’s one for the ages.

Zifnab25 - June 13, 2010 | 10:24 am · Link

That’s the beauty of being the CEO. Succeed and give yourself a stack of money. Fail and give yourself a stack of money. Tread water and give yourself a stack of money. The helicopter out to Palm Beach on Tuesday, so you don’t miss your tee time.

Management at these firms has gotten incredibly shitty. There is no pressure to compete and no price for failure. Zero accountability capitalism. Unless the stockholders bust out torches and pitchforks. And shareholders are more notoriously disinterested than your average American voter.

adolphus - June 13, 2010 | 10:28 am · Link

Ever listen to students talk about their grades? It’s always “I got an A!” but “The teacher gave me a C!” Corporate executives never grow out of that. Healthy, mature adults learn to take responsibility and learn lessons from their failures and mistakes. But then, I’ll bet Scully et al aren’t worrying how they will pay for expensive dental work. I guess maturity is for losers.

WereBear - June 13, 2010 | 10:46 am · Link

I just finished Bright Side, by Barbara Ehrenreich (get it through this blog and give John the pennies) and her chapter on corporate positive thinking was absolutely devastating. I remember a smart boss of mine saying he encouraged people to come in with bad news; it was the only way he would know what was really going on.

However, this has become a firing offense, so no one does. With obvious results.

And really, in a Darwinian sense, why should they care? Whether they screw up or not, they still get fat bonuses and multiple houses… this system utterly removes feedback.

Steeplejack - June 13, 2010 | 10:55 am · Link

@Tom Levenson:

I wonder [. . .] how it feels for characters like Scully to know, somewhere deep in their remnants of souls, that they are the punchline to one of those “worst ever . . .” bar jokes.

I can’t imagine they ever have an uninterrupted night’s sleep; sometime around 3 a.m. every morning going “I did what?”

I think the power of denial is incredibly strong. I worked at a small software company in the ‘80s that was a leader in its market and had the potential to be a Lotus or an Intuit, i.e., completely dominant in its segment, with bazillions of dollars poised to rain down on everybody in the vicinity. And the founders/principals completely and utterly blew it, and ended up selling the company for a pittance to a much larger company that didn’t know shit but wanted to “get into the biz,” so to speak. They settled for six-figure buyouts (I think the president maybe got a million or two), and the little people got to keep their jobs. Good times.

My point is that, running into one or another of those principals occasionally over the years, I was always amazed at how consistently they had rewritten history in their minds. The (bad) decisions they had made were forced on them by circumstances, the venture capitalists, inexorable industry trends—anything but their own judgment. They did the best they could with what they had, yadda, yadda, yadda. Sorry it didn’t work out better. But, hey, they were minor celebrities in that sort of “You remember those guys who . . .” way.

The only analogy I can think of (and I don’t think this is true at all) would be if some second-tier actor like Bruce Campbell (and I like Bruce Campbell) passed up the career-making lead in Die Hard that went to Bruce Willis but managed to completely put that out of his mind while going around boasting, “Yeah, I was in Army of Darkness!” Ugh.

I feel like I should apologize to Bruce Campbell for using him in this analogy.

Anyway, my point is that very few of us will construct a narrative in which we are the goat or an idiot. And so you start clutching at straws—anything—to support the narrative you do come up with. “He smelled bad!” “They put decals on my mirrors!”

d0n camillo - June 13, 2010 | 11:13 am · Link

I feel like I should apologize to Bruce Campbell for using him in this analogy.

You absolutely positively should apologize to Bruce Campbell for comparing him to John Scully. Bruce is a lot more likely to own up to any mistakes he’s made than any CEO ever will.

PeakVT - June 13, 2010 | 11:55 am · Link

One of the biggest fuckups in the history of American business was the firing of Steve Jobs

Meh. There’s no guarantee that Jobs would have succeeded like he has if he’d been kept on. Though NeXT was a failure in the marketplace, Jobs learned some things that he probably wouldn’t have if he had stayed at Apple. And bringing in the BSD codebase as the base-layer operating system freed the Apple engineers to concentrate on the user interface. (I like to think of OS X as the GUI Unix had been waiting two decades for.) Would he have done that if he had stayed the whole time? Who knows.

grumpy realist - June 13, 2010 | 12:33 pm · Link

Actually, the NeXT made a lot of us geeks quite happy for a long time. I loved the ability to flip back and forth between pictorial-pulling-with-the-mouse and coding-at-the-terminal modes, depending on which was more efficient. I had the power of a workstation at my fingertips but didn’t have to deal with the overhead. Also remember that the NeXT OS is what finally made it into the Mac several years down the road. Great machine, made a lot of starving physics/math grad students very very happy.

Mnemosyne - June 13, 2010 | 12:35 pm · Link

As someone who’s used nothing but Apple products for the past 20 years, I actually think being fired was the best thing that ever happened to Steve Jobs. It forced him to actually learn to work well (or at least better) with others and accept that he was not, in fact, infalliable.

It was a bad move for Apple, but it was great for Jobs and allowed him to get the experience he would need to come back and make Apple what it is today. We wouldn’t have had the iMac or iPod or iPhone if Jobs hadn’t been canned.

Nylund - June 13, 2010 | 1:05 pm · Link

They nearly bankrupted Apple because they didn’t like his outfit. Carly Fiorina, who nearly bankrupted HP, is now insulting Barbara Boxer’s hair. Are they running a company or re-enacting scenes from Heathers and Mean Girls? Maybe the obsession with looks and clothes in American Psycho wasn’t so far off after all. Tell me why again we should fear any of these people “going Galt?”

Mr Furious - June 13, 2010 | 2:17 pm · Link

@Mnemosyne: Probably true. I’m sure there was plenty of “my shit doesn’t stink!” from all directions at the time.

I’m happy with the outcome, and I imagine so is Jobs. And Sculley will forever be known as the biggest jackass is early computing history…so it’s all good.

Jon H - June 13, 2010 | 2:55 pm · Link

@New Yorker: “Steve Jobs should start wearing thousand-dollar suits like Dick Fuld and Charles Prince. That’s what makes a great corporate leader.”

I believe he did wear suits at NeXT when his best customers were investment banks.

300baud - June 13, 2010 | 5:12 pm · Link

@PeakVT:

Meh. There’s no guarantee that Jobs would have succeeded like he has if he’d been kept on.

Absolutely. As an early Mac user and then a NeXT developer, I’d say there’s no reason to think that The Steve wouldn’t have screwed up just as badly if he’d stayed on at Apple.

Both with the Mac and with NeXT, he made the mistake of mainly building for himself. It’s only after the years in the wilderness plus the near collapse of NeXT that he seems to have learned how to focus on making what his audience wants.

jethro - June 13, 2010 | 6:20 pm · Link

Scully’s not hiding his mistakes now, however.

I read a recent interview where he admitted it was a huge mistake to take him on as CEO of Apple, that he wasn’t talented enough to build products, and that the board should have put him into marketing and left Jobs as CEO.

Chris - June 13, 2010 | 8:18 pm · Link

Ever listen to students talk about their grades? It’s always “I got an A!” but “The teacher gave me a C!”

Well, you can stake that claim
Good work is the key to good fortune
Winners take that praise
Losers seldom take that blame …

Panurge - June 14, 2010 | 1:33 am · Link

@Chris:

Am I the only other one here who knows that reference?

I’ve always tried to stay mindful of that (not that taking the blame for my life has exactly helped me). Funny thing—ISTR psychologist Martin Seligman reporting that optimists tend to avoid blaming themselves as such for their failures; they’ll come up with some external explanation rather than just “I suck”. This helps them get back in the game. So maybe that’s part of why such people keep making it to the top—they’re less likely to be discouraged by personal failures.

@Nylund:

Very, very much so—I could tell you that and I’ve only read a few paragraphs of American Psycho. Just think about the Hippie Wars of the ‘60s and ‘70s—they never really ended, it’s just that HIPPIES [*] are now getting crapped on by both REAGAN and PUNK. (Example in AP: Patrick Bateman prefers ‘80s Genesis to ‘70s Genesis.) Things had not changed for so long that they were regarded as features of the universe, so to speak; it was a real shock to millions of people to find out that they weren’t. So in order to fight that, an informal campaign was put together to frame HIPPIES as something worth rebelling against—and hey, what better vessel for rebelling against HIPPIES than REAGAN? So now you have a bunch of Bircthers with buzzcuts dumping on HIPPIES and imagining that they’re being bold, rebellious, and independent-minded.

[*] This is just a catch-all name for a large, broad cultural current in Western society; I’m sure you can figure out what REAGAN and PUNK mean.