Larry Ellison | Bulldozer00's Blog

Just One Measly Tweet?

September 8, 2012 bulldozer00 1 comment

I just found out from this article, “The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work“, that Oracle’s mercurial CEO, Larry Ellison, has tweeted one, and only one, message out onto the ether. And a nasty one it is:

The Fast Company article’s author, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, also states an interesting fact:

Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom. Within the C-suite, perceptions remain that social media is at best a soft PR tool and at worst a time sink for already distracted employees. Without a push from the top, many of the biggest companies have been slow to take the social media plunge.

Ryan goes on to speculate that the status quo may change because of the findings in a report from the McKinsey Global Institute:

According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. At the high end, that approaches Australia’s annual GDP. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises”.

BD00 hopes that Mr. Holmes is right, but there’s a lot of inertia and outdated tradition motivating the mute behavior in the head shed. There’s paranoia about giving away too much information to competitors and there’s a fear that the penthouse occupants might say something that destroys the illustrious image of infallibility unconsciously burned into the minds of themselves and their minions.

Just cutting email out of the picture in favor of social sharing translates to a productivity windfall as “more enterprise information becomes accessible and searchable, rather than locked up as ‘dark matter’ in inboxes.”

Oh man, despite the risk of being served with a cease-and-desist order and/or being slapped with a slander lawsuit, I couldn’t resist the urge to do this:

Besides our buddy Larry, can you name all the faymoose people in this dastardly mugshot collage without using Google? I’d offer up a BD00.com T-shirt to the winner, but I’m all sold out.

CEOs and Social Media (web2.sys-con.com)
Do Non Tweeting CEOs and Brands Leave Money on the Table? (radian6.com)
How is Social Media Affecting Your Business? (elocal.com)
Fortune 500 Increased Use of Social Media in 2012 – Twitter #1 (customerthink.com)
Social Media’s Productivity Payoff (blogs.hbr.org)

Categories: business Tags: CEO, Fast Company, Larry Ellison, management, McKinsey & Company, organizational behavior, social media, Twitter

Generalizations

May 12, 2011 bulldozer00 3 comments

To function semi-sanely in this world, we all have to make generalizations so that we can make sense of the world and to at least try to be able to predict future outcomes that result from our actions. It’s OK to make them as long as one realizes that there are exceptions to every generalization. There are very few, if any, absolutes in the world. Assuming that one’s personally concocted generalizations are absolutely 100% true all of the time invites “suffering“, no?

Take the mercurial CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, for example. He seems to be at least one exception to my personal generalization that “dictator” bosses can’t be successful in the long term (Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is another exception). Check out these blurbs that I pulled from cyberspace:

I think that one reason why Jobs and Apple achieve the stellar product and financial success that they do is because, even at the lofty CEO level, Mr. Jobs gets his hands dirty – and that endears him to the technical and creative talent that he does retain at the company. Contrast this to a Stalinist brute like “chainsaw” Al Dunlap, who lived in a separate world “above” his people.

How about you? Do you think that my “dictators can’t be successful leaders in the long run” generalization is valid in most cases? What’s your equivalent generalization?

Categories: management Tags: CEO, Larry Ellison, leadership, linkedin, postaday2011, Steve Jobs

Judgment, Integrity, Credibility, Honesty, And $53M

March 15, 2011 bulldozer00 Leave a comment

The often (but not always) incestuous relationship between hand picked corpo board of directors yes-men and CEOs has come to the fore again: “HP orders probe into Hurd’s departure”. Why would Hewlett Packard, as represented by its board of derelicts, I mean directors, investigate their own handling of Hurd’s dismissal? They’re not doing it because it’s the right thing to do. They’re only doing it because they’re being forced to:

“HP’s plan for an outside investigation follows a lawsuit in San Jose, Calif., by shareholders who allege that the company’s directors wasted money by giving Hurd $53 million in severance.”

Yepp, a gift of $53 million to Mr. Hurd for exhibiting:

A profound lack of judgment. It (Hurd’s dismissal) had to do with integrity, it had to do with credibility and it had to do with honesty.” – Mike Holston, HP’s general counsel

After doling out that kind of dough, can’t the same be said about HP’s board? Well, that’s what we may find out after the dust settles. In the meantime, HP’s board may have gotten what they deserved. Mr. Hurd has Madoff nicely by skidaddling over to one of HP’s biggest competitors, Oracle Inc. He and his buddy, Oracle oracle Larry Ellison, sure do know how to make money.

“Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” said CEO Larry Ellison in a statement.

The real question is: “How isolated are these types of incidents?“. Just because they get reported in the press doesn’t mean that dishonesty runs rampant in the bozone layers of big business. Nevertheless, it begs the question: “Is the taken-for-granted, rarely-questioned process in which CEOs and boards of directors are chosen broken?“. Boards anoint CEOs (who coincidentally are often the chairman of the board) and CEOs nominate board members for election. What do you think of the process? How can it be made better?