Preparing To Fire an Executive

http://bhorowitz.com/2011/08/24/preparing-to-fire-an-executive/

by jayliew • 15 years ago

104 33 15 years ago

staunch• 15 years ago

All this makes me think is that I never want to run a really large head-count organization. The kinds of thinking and "work" he had to do at Opsware are exhausting just to read about.

civilian2• 15 years ago

My takeaway: Executives get fired, but N*&$!s get capped & bagged.

9999• 15 years ago

The contrast between his super-PC usage of she/her instead of he/him (or even they/them) and the Dre song makes for some lovely cognitive dissonance.

temphn• 15 years ago

This particular contradiction runs deep. The last bastion of unapologetic masculinity today is gangsta rap. A CEO is nothing if not competitive, a traditionally masculine trait. Yet a modern CEO must also be uber-PC. Thus the contrast.

roel_v2• 15 years ago

It's funny in a screwed up way because he uses the 'she' form for a person to be fired. So in a weird PC way I thought 'man, why is this guy harping on this poor woman being fired - as if guys can't screw up and be fired'.

So to be really PC he needs to step it up a notch - prefer to 'he/him' when somebody is doing something wrong, and 'she/her' when doing something good :)

cpr• 15 years ago

His attempt to be PC and make the firee a "she" backfired--it sounds sexist to have the failing executive be female.

Give it up, folks--just use "he" as a generic pronoun. No one thinks it means you think one gender is better than the other.

orangecat• 15 years ago

There's nothing wrong with "they" as third person singular.

dan_manges• 15 years ago

I'd say he's going for being contrarian rather than PC. It didn't sound sexist to me, likely because the CEO was also female.

rwolf• 15 years ago

It did not backfire. It should not be given up.

lanstein• 15 years ago

Ben always uses 'she' in his posts.

d2• 15 years ago

This is right on - particularly the part about you screwing up the hiring process, not the exec being at fault. I made assumptions about a level of professionalism that I never assessed properly. I went through this a year+ ago and I hired the wrong guy. Unfortunately he took the legal language in emails during the termination process personally - another symptom of the root cause for which he was fired.

lsc2• 15 years ago

>This is right on - particularly the part about you screwing up the hiring process

really, I think this attitude is the best way to look at it when you have to fire anyone, executive or not.

davidw• 15 years ago

Yes and no - it's a case of asymmetric information, and while you can do your best to obtain more information (hiring process), you can't know exactly how a person will perform until they're actually there.

tedsuo• 15 years ago

I'm not sure why the exec is less at fault than another class of employee. If you hire a programmer or designer who can't deliver, how is that any different?

JamesBlair3• 15 years ago

Because the executive's performance depends on the team he's working with. If there's mismatch between the executive's leadership and the team, that will result in difficulties regardless of his skill.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

so if his performance is bad, it's the fault of his team. but if his performance is good, it justifies the huge bucks they make. i sense a discrepancy.

in my world, with greater reward should come greater responsibility.

civilian2• 15 years ago

I totally agree, but how do you find a match between an executive & the team during the interview process?

wanorris• 15 years ago

I think the same thing can be true of highly qualified professionals as well. If you are hiring good developers and designers, it may make sense to take the same approach: Did we not screen for the right technical fit? Did we make a mistake in assessing the cultural fit? Professionals and managers can have a lot in common in this way.

On the other hand, a large organization has many other kinds of staff. When you hire other types of employees (call center workers, loading dock workers, bookkeepers, etc.), you don't necessarily have the ability to do the same kinds of screening in advance, and you won't always be able to find workers with the same level of commitment and professionalism to staff lower-tier positions. So you're more likely to fire someone simply because they couldn't or wouldn't do their jobs correctly than you are with professionals and executives.

JamesBlair3• 15 years ago

Why is the rationale for preserving the reputation of the fired executive first making yourself look good and only incidentally that it's the fair and decent thing to do. The fair and decent thing to do should be reason #1.

mathattack• 15 years ago

Very interesting. One point on firing senior executives - in many cases it's the first time the executive ever failed. Silicon Valley is perhaps the only exception, but this is precisely because exits are handled well. Being good at separations increases a company's ability to take risks on hiring.

ethank• 15 years ago

At some point when the statute ends I have to do a post about firing yourself. I did that in January (in a sense).

roel_v2• 15 years ago

Very informative post. I (and I suspect many others reading this) regularly have to fire executives at multinationals with several thousands in staff and 100's of millions in turnover. I'm going to bookmark this and the next time I need to, I'll be sure to re-read this blog post - because every time I do something like this, I rely on blog posts to instruct me on how to do it.

(yes yes I'm a snarky asshole - I liked to read it too, I guess in the same way women like to read in Cosmopolitan about cocktail parties where super models wear designer dresses and party all night every night drinking 1000$ / bottle champagne and have affairs with billionaires, but really, when you look at it critically, what is the value of this to anyone but the top 1/1000th percentile of the population?)

count• 15 years ago

Where does he imply that this is only for huge companies? Even small start-ups have executives, staff, and a board.

The lesson is the same no matter the scale. If you hire a CTO and then have to fire that CTO, it's most likely your screw up.

Preparing To Fire an Executive

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