TL;DR: Bad times tell very poignantly those with a clue from those without.

I saw a post the other day about an interview by a former CEO of Apple, John Sculley, who lately thinks AI is going to replace programmers. The caveat? Sculley originally came from marketing, and stopped managing much of anything in 1993. Since that time he’s been an investor. This means he never even was an engineer, or in charge of modern engineers in a way that would inform him whether they could be replaced by AI. Yeah, he was a CEO, but I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.

Sculley was dismissed as Apple CEO 29 years ago, and replaced by Gil Amelio, who was himself dismissed in 1997, with the company essentially dead in the water. The terrified investors called in the notoriously uncouth founding CEO, Steve Jobs. That move played out brilliantly, because Jobs’ core vision of disrupting the way we experience computers in our daily lives was spot-on. Out of a lost cause in 1997, Jobs made Apple what it is today. The potential of Apple was there before Jobs, but neither Sculley nor Amelio could action that, and probably they just did not see that nearly as well as Jobs did.

I saw another post on HackerNews, about Barnes and Noble’s ostensible turnaround, after years of doing badly. That change was attributed to hiring a CEO who is actually an expert in organizing book stores – who was able to achieve that change by stopping book promotion/placement deals with publishers that were toxic to shopping experience, and reforming Barnes and Noble locations as hubs where people who like books and can bond over that. This is a drastic departure from the previous meta-strategy, which included trying to go into eBooks (which is low-margin and requires tech expertise, hence an awful fit for an American corporate), to open restaurants at bookstore locations (which is likewise a low-margin, high-operations-expertise endeavor) and indeed years of ignoring the fact that Barnes and Noble could actually, dunno, just be a great place to buy books.

The hypotheses I’d like to articulate basing on that:

  • Vision is rare and calling out visionaries is hard. Corporate survival selects essentially for optics, like being able to make up hypey headlines, visionary types don’t need that much of that facility, hence don’t develop it.
  • The only long-term stable situation regarding vision is not having a vision. Accordingly, by far the presumption regarding the the opinions of a corporate manager - no matter how senior in title - should be that they lack vision.
  • Accordingly, it is the essential interest of a business’s shareholders that there is actually a source of vision - and just one such source - for the business to survive over time. This is an easy thing to miss when times are good and profits are accumulating, but it becomes unavoidable in bad times, such as what we’re having now.