Comment by indymike
5 years ago
I've never met a CEO that doesn't understand their main product. Sometimes, the main product isn't what the employees and engineers think it is. Sometimes that product is the company itself.
5 years ago
I've never met a CEO that doesn't understand their main product. Sometimes, the main product isn't what the employees and engineers think it is. Sometimes that product is the company itself.
> "Sometimes that product is the company itself."
I suspect there is a cause and effect relationship here, a CEO with an M&A background will always see the company this way. A CEO with a product background may make the companies customer's/product/team more valuable to an acquirer.
The M&A culture of the 80s was pretty toxic, businesses that financed their own expansion/revamp in lean times were looted for their bank accounts during deep recessions. The "survivors" now run with only a few months in the bank, making the whole economy more dependent on financial liquidity. We'll probably never know whether financially lean enterprises were more capital efficient or just riskier.