Should billg Stop Bullying?

In a comment on my post on Bill Gates’ management style, reader Kempton asked:

“..do you think has billg got mellow out a little as he aged, got a great wife and partner, and also kid(s)? He still seem quite geeky but I sure hope with age, he got mellow out a little.

“Do you got to see billg after your time at MSFT? Does he remember people who worked for him before?...”

I did see billg several times when I was running AT&T WorldNet and afterwards when I left AT&T to found ITXC.  He was interested in both businesses, congratulated me on WorldNet’s success, and was gracious enough to volunteer that I had been right about some of the Internet issues which he and I had disagreed on and had partially led to my leaving Microsoft following the battle of Shumway Mansion.

Don’t know directly whether he’s gotten more mellow.  Not sure at all that I hope he has.  The philanthropic work that he and Melinda are doing is incredibly important and incredibly hard.  They are among very few individuals with the resources to make substantive change in some of the world’s most hopeless places; and they’re dedicated to doing just that.

Sympathy and good intentions and even scads of money are not enough.  An incredible tough-mindedness is needed to assure that aid isn’t just stolen or diverted to feel-good projects which make no long term difference.  Those who think corruption needs to get its due need all the bullying billg can bring to bear to be forced out of the way not to mention those who aren’t willing to radically upset the stsus quo.  His aid projects need even tougher review than his product development projects.  I hope that he’s still “hard core” about the things he cares about and as effective at bringing his attention to bear.

Mary and I have seen signs of other NGOs – particularly those who get money from ex-Microsofties – taking a cue from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and demanding better accountability than they would have before.  This alone is an accomplishment.

Is bullying a good management style?  Worth a post on its own; but both jlc and D.C. have posted comments on their experience with Admiral Rickover – seemingly someone no one would want to work for.  But atomic subs got built!

Governor Richard Snelling of Vermont, from whom I learned an incredible amount about both managing and governance, had bullying in his arsenal.  So did Mr. O.  I’ve been gentler than any of the above but they usually got better results.

The fictional Larry Lazard in my novel hackoff.com: an historical murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble was a bully; his results were mixed.

Microsoft Memories is about billg.

Microsoft Meetings is more memories plus a bonus audio clip.

Comments

[David Blomstrom]

I have no use for bullies, in the workplace or otherwise. And your suggestion that Bill Gates is a "philanthropist" is imply absurd.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is an INVESTMENT FIRM. For crying out loud, they couldn't even relocate their headquarters to the Seattle Center without screwing Seattle taxpayers out of several million dollars.

And after "donating" untold millions of dollars to the Seattle School District, Seattle's public schools have only deteriorated.

Bill Gates is one of the biggest shams in world history. He's truly a world-class jerk.

Anyone who really wants to stick it to Bill should get behind my campaign for public office.

Seattle-Mafia.org

[Robert C.]

The Gates Foundation is known around Seattle as having a different atmosphere than other nonprofits. They act more like a company, and they're very serious about their work and about getting results. I think that's a very good thing. I worked there briefly; they still say "Bill G." when they're referring to billg.

[Dan]

If you want to know if Billg's or Steveb's management style is effective, just look at Microsoft's stock price from the last several years and a list of their newest products.... hmmm, yeah, I thought so.

[Brian Y Chen]

I think there is a systematic misunderstanding of professional criticism in both this forum and in the workplaces described. "Assholes" and "Facilitators" are the stick and the carrot, and neither is ever good for an organization because they both are blunt tools towards improvement. Effective managers use positive and negative criticism, and the difference is lost too easily to the crude simplifcation of carrot and stick.

Negative criticism is not about punishment, as it is most often misused, and in the hands of a rude person, an "asshole", it is rude and unprofessional. Negative criticsm is the act of pointing out incorrect action and explaining why it is incorrect. "You did this wrong" and "here is why you should not do it". Never EVER give one without the other, or it isnt negative criticism. Too often people will say something like "your pitching sucks", and others will nod and call that "criticism". Thats not criticism, thats name calling. Negative criticism must provide an analytical reason for incorrect action. Real negative criticsm, which points out what is wrong and why it is wrong, is frequently called "constructive criticsm", and mistakenly lumped with POSITIVE criticsm (by assholes). Moreover, the term "Constructive criticism" is actually a oxymoron: criticism is fundamentally an analytical activity. There is never anything constructive about it. It is the OPPOSITE of constructive.

FAR less understood than negative criticism is positive criticism. Positive criticism is not about making people feed good. Positive criticsm has far higher impact that negative criticism because so few people know how to do it. Correct positive criticism is "This is what you did right" and "this is why". Why is this important? Most managers forget that they are to also act as MENTORS for their subordinates. And their subordinates do not know how to do their job right, and often result to what appears (from above) to be random or arbitrary behavior, and it is because they are CONFUSED. Positive criticism identifies correct action when it is done, and explains why (and when) it should be repeated, AND, MOST importantly, gives subordinates a position from which to develop their own ideas and efforts. By giving subordinates a point to build on, many are capable of developing very significant contributions.

Criticism has nothing to do with feelings. I blame the whole load of bullcrap on people who do not know how to communicate, and I fault the public school system for fixing in people's minds the notion of a stick and a carrot. positive and negative criticism should never leave someone feeling bad or good, as long as they are not arrogant themselves. Arrogant people should always be removed from an organization because they are resistant to any criticism, and they tend to impose bad criticism (stick and carrot style criticsm) on others.

[rjb]

I used to work at a company run by a husband-and-wife team of completely awful people. There was lots of yelling, insults and generally belittling of ideas not their own. Initiative was not well-accepted. There were a couple of workers there who were not particularly bright or hard-working, but they could take the personalities and they got promoted and put in charge of projects. One in particular stands out - every project this one worked on failed, but someone else always got the blame. The one thing this team knew how to do was hire good people, and even though the best ones would always leave, it kept the company going although it is battered by its competition.

I stood it for two years, mainly because it was dang challenging to get anything done in that environment and it was fun to keep them from firing the good people on my staff. Over time, that company will accumulate more and more mediocre workers.

[Adam McKee]

Assholes in the organization can be very destructive. There are a lot of talented and hard-working people who have a very limited tolerance for abuse -- they will simply walk out the door rather than put up with it. However as others have pointed out, we have to differentiate between two kinds of assholes: the asshole who is motivated by self-interest (i.e. he just enjoys bullying people), and the "righteous asshole" who believes he can help the company by crapping on others. There could be instances where you have to be rude with people, in order to get the results you want. I think you have to carefully consider whether the employee needs you to "shake up their world" by getting in their face, or whether they really are putting forth an honest effort, in which case berating them will only make the situation worse. My sense is that, as a manager, one should try to motivate with a carrot first of all, and use the stick sparingly. I don't think there's any way to avoid ever using the stick though - it's an imperfect world and you'll have to be rude sometimes to get the results you need.

Anyway that's my $0.02. Interesting article :-)

[Shadus]

The problem with the bully style of management is that it can work on a extremely large scale (eg: Microsoft, Sun, etc...) however on a small scale it is pure poison... most companies can't afford to have the 2-3 "smart" people who work for them to have every idea shot down or them leaving the company because they're miserable. The "smart" people make up maybe 5-10% of the entire work force the rest are there just doing their job, if you are a company of less than 50 people and you burn your smart people by being an ass you're signing your businesses death warrant... and I think the advantage of the other style of management (eg: google) is becoming quite obvious... although I'm not sure that would work on a small scale either.

[Daniel Markham]

I've been doing consulting all over the place for the past 20 years or so. While I've never had any desire to abuse myself at Microsoft, I knew a few folks that have. I also have seen both "the bully" and "the facilitator" management styles up close and personal.

The problem with the bully is that it all depends on tha ability of the underlings to facilitate. One guy can't be the ego of an organization -- he nees the troops more than the troops need him. Having said that, if you've got 10K really smart folks, the asshole strategy has a LOT of benefits. For one, you don't ever have to take responsibility for anything -- you just have to be the jerk. I have seen federal programs lose tens of millions of dollars to the assertive asshole strategy. Everybody meant well, and god knows trial by fire just turns some folks on, but the style relies on perceived value to the jerk, not necessarily value to the organization (or what about those pesky people called customers?) Microsoft is quickly becoming famous for doing things that are great for Microsoft, but no so much for the customer. Sounds like there's your result for THAT management strategy.

Ironically, the problem with the facilitator is that it depends on the underlings being assholes. That is, business is more than just feel-good psychobabble. Deadlines have to be made, targets have to be met. Somebody had better be damn sure that stuff is happening. I've also seen programs dump millions on stuff put together by people who managed to make everyone feel GREAT about the product and the team, but there was no execution intelligence. In the end, you get a lot of smart people working on stuff that sounded good at the time everything was being facilitated so well, but the world has moved on. In a way, wonderful communicators and persuaders are much more dangerous than assholes in the IT industry. It's a tough racket.

I could give my opinion, but until I get the job running Microsoft I'll just keep my yap shut. I can say I'll never work for somebody like billg. And I know there are millions more like me. Maybe Microsoft doesn't need us, but the market sure as hell does.

[CS]

In light of the previous comment on 'No assholes in the workplace', would M$ have made their way to being a successful company without this assholes element? Would they have one of the greatest fortunes of all time with out it? Are we just trying to deny that the asshole element has a value?

[JB]

I worked for Microsoft much more recently (2005-2006), and while I have never been to a billg briefing, people on my team had, and it sounds like nothing has changed.

Is this a good thing? I dunno. My assessment of MSFT is that there are a lot of very smart, very motivated, and very good and nice people there. However, there are a lot of pricks, too, and I now feel that I know why MSFT puts so much effort and money into products and gets things that are often so horribly flawed, or as I like to put it, the sum of the parts (the brilliant people) exceeds the whole (the product that gets RTMed): the culture makes it really, really hard, to produce really, really good products.

Also, it may drive away some of the best people, either making them leave MSFT or causing them to never work there in the first place. One has only to look at what Apple has done with OS X (I recently got my first Mac, and my overall reaction is "wow!") or the strides being made in Linux by some distributions, most notably Ubuntu and its variants Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu, to see that a lot of the innovation is no longer with Microsoft. It has great momentum, true, but momentum is just inertia, it's not acceleration.

MSFT has some great products, it's true - Sharepoint is really impressive and has no equal or even near equal in open source and Exchange 2007 is a great re-write and a huge step forward - but Windows itself is stagnant, and while the ribbon in O2K7 is kind of neat once you get used to it, it's not worth the price. I'm sticking with O2K3 on my Windows systems, and use NeoOffice on my Mac.

[Dave Ritchie]

a recent book that flies in the face of this sort of behavior is "The No Assholes Rule - Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't" by Robert Sutton, a professor of Management Science at Stanford. From Amazon's review: "Sutton argues that assholes—those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their aggression on the less powerful—poison the work environment, decrease productivity, induce qualified employees to quit and therefore are detrimental to businesses, regardless of their individual effectiveness." I have not read the book yet, but it has been purchased and is in the 'to be read' pile... I have dealt with too many places where this appears to be the norm.