Paul Cantrell
Oh yeah, @thecorodon is singing my tune here:
https://wandering.shop/@thecorodon/111075315601088473
As someone put it to me once: “If a decision can cost or save a company $1 billion, doesn’t paying them $10 million to make that decision make sense?”
That’s solid reasoning…though I doubt the underlying assumptions. But…is it true? Could it really work that way? Well…
1/
Paul Cantrell
Consider:
In the mid-00s, after the dot com bubble had fizzled and during Amazon’s ascendance to total domination, Best Buy had a substantial and rather enviable in-house custom software operation. It’s a lot to get going: not just hires, but a culture to establish, process, precedent, momentum. They had it. At that crucial moment, they had it.
And on day, they outsourced it all to Accenture.
2/
Paul Cantrell
To be clear: by “outsourced,” I mean they took essentially 100% of their in-house software development capacity and handed it over to Accenture. People who’d been Best Buy employees were suddenly Accenture employees overnight.
I don’t need to walk you through the rapid disintegration, people going to the winds, Best Buy’s desperate attempts to back out of that Accenture contract. Use your imagination.
3/
Paul Cantrell
By the late 00s, Best Buy was a company on its heels. They maybe could have gone head to head with Amazon, but the CEO made a terrible decision that set them back 10 years.
And here’s the point: in hindsight, it was very clearly a terrible decision. The kind of decision we supposedly pay CEOs not to make.
So…did that CEO get paid the usual gajillions? Or where they booted from industry, never able to find work again? Well…
4/
Paul Cantrell
…nope!
He stayed on for 5 more years. His pay went •up• after his disastrous decision-making.
And what finally got him out of Best Buy? He retired. He’s now on the board of PragerU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Anderson_(executive)
So whenever people say that we have to pay CEOs all that money because they make the big important decisions, I think of Best Buy and just laugh.
/end
Paul Cantrell
@gretared
Ha, sending them out of the frying pan and into the fire there
Gretchen Anderson
@inthehands in all seriousness tho, I worked for a de dev studio around then making websites. We did a project to assess the needs of a large hard drive mfr and came up with a huge roadmap that was mostly systems integration. I told them to call someone like Accenture to do the work because we were not at all qualified to do it. My boss was *livid* but that client never forgot I was honest with them. Those were the days.
Gretchen Anderson
@inthehands Accenture in 1999/2000 was like 5 min old as a dev shop. Shoulda gone w Deloitte. 😝
Paul Cantrell
@matthew
I have wondered the same. I’ve never heard a public accounting that even came close to echoing the experiences I heard from the many people I know who worked there at the time.
Matthew Reinbold
@inthehands Has there ever been the full white paper treatment of the Best Buy/Accenture story published anywhere?
Paul Cantrell
@thatandromeda @mcnulla
Oh dear
Andromeda Yelton
@mcnulla @inthehands …after which he ended up as co-CEO at Oracle, where, among other things, he narrated the required sexual harassment training videos.
McNulla
@inthehands
Mark Hurd was given $50 million dollars to leave HP “for cause”, meaning he’s broke the rules about reimbursement expenses (reimbursed for personal trips with his mistress). I’d have been walked out, not a dime, and likely legal charges. This after HP was nickel and diming employees, reducing benefits of every kind & reducing pay under his reign.
Paul Cantrell
@mwyman Same, both counts
Michael Wyman
@inthehands I lived in Minneapolis at the time, and knew people impacted by this at Best Buy’s headquarters.
And had known people fucked over by Accenture for a long time before that to remember thinking this was a disaster brewing.
Paul Cantrell
I guess an obvious but important addendum here:
Everyone who worked at Best Buy at the time knew this would be a disaster. Opinion ran the gamut from “those idiots” to “those fuckers.” In hindsight, the prevailing opinion of the people in the midst of the work was correct, and the CEO was wrong.
That’s not to say that employees always know everything, or that there’s never value in a leader with perspective, but…listening to the folks on the ground even a little would have prevented a fiasco.
Paul Cantrell
Original AI-related thread that spurred the Best Buy digression, ICYMI:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111075245991998920
Paul Cantrell
@donaldball
I mean, workplace democracy is chaotic and fraught and implosion-prone…but I’m not sure it’s worse!
Donald Ball
@inthehands Something something workplace democracy
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