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January 10, 2008
Elop, culture
Elop, culture: Stephen Elop, who was Macromedia's CEO a few years ago, is in the news today for taking a very important position at Microsoft: President of Microsoft Business Division, reporting directly to Steve Ballmer, alongside Robbie Bach (XBox, Mobile) and Kevin Johnson (Windows, Internet). That business division with Microsoft Office is sixteen billion dollars a year -- four times the cost of Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia -- and now the person responsible for it all is someone who has been a part of Macromedia culture. That's significant, I think.
Context: This is just me talking, from what I myself have seen. No one else reviews it or edits it... doesn't speak for others, just speaks for me. The standard caveat from Mr. Clemens applies.
Stephen joined Macromedia in 1998. My memory is that he came in to the internal IT group first, taking responsibility for email, servers, communications. I think it was at an annual all-hands at Hearst Theatre on Van Ness where he was first introduced by Rob Burgess. Stephen was a Canadian with a crewcut, among an audience of brilliant pierced bodybuilders and other oddballs, and we were told at length during the presentation about his experience in the Boston Chicken restaurant chain. But despite all that things actually did work out okay.
Over the next few years he took on more responsibilities within Macromedia, and I eventually reported to him through Sherry Page, who led Tech Support and Customer Service at the time. Stephen always had a keen interest in what customers were saying, and took an active role in bringing customer advice into the organization's decisionmaking.
He's approachable, friendly. Efficient communication is best, and from afar he might seem reserved, but he listens hard, with a fast sense of humor, and don't be surprised if he recognizes you by name after only one meeting. He'll listen to what you say -- you may not always know the results of your input, but your input will be heard.
Administrations tend to bring in teams, rather than just individuals. Top execs in a new domain will rely on existing staffers already familiar with that domain, and also bring in people with whom they've worked before. They need a team -- it's not just one person. I wouldn't be surprised to see other familiar Macromedia faces join Microsoft over the coming months.
I don't know Jeff Raikes at all, but I know Microsoft got someone special when they hired Stephen Elop to oversee Microsoft Office.
But that brings up a different topic, one that I've been thinking about for awhile, but haven't talked about much.
"Corporate culture" isn't just about corporations -- it's about any group, with history, which strives towards a common goal. Mozilla or the W3C has a "corporate culture"... so do news-reporting organizations... your local City Hall has a different shared history than the City Hall two towns over... you can even tell the difference in emotional tone among neighborhood grocery stores. Each is defined as much by its customers as by its employees -- the "corporate culture" of how a body of people will act is influenced by the entire history of how that group has interacted with its environment in the past.
Adobe's social culture is very strongly influenced by the values of its early years -- Warnock, Geschke, Xerox Park, PostScript, the wildly democratizing effect of desktop publishing, the years of work towards portable documents. These events set Adobe's corporate culture, and shape it to this day. I had heard of this cultural environment when I worked at Macromedia, but really saw it, very strongly, after the acquisition. There's an idealism, an academic approach towards technological democratization, that you can still see inside Adobe today.
Each corporate body of people does slowly develop its own unique culture. Goals are made, decisions become commitments, and new members are shaped by the group's history. This culture influences what each group will do in the future.
But groups also change over time. There's interbreeding between groups, cross-pollination. As Macromedia and Adobe grew larger they both started hiring more general business professionals, which moderated the corporate cultures established by the early enthusiasts. At these scales, such business professionals are vital -- the work can no longer be done by enthusiasts alone.
Lots of people in the technology field are more a part of this common Silicon Valley culture than of any particular corporate culture. Job-hopping is more the rule than the exception, and so many values end up being shared across businesses. This common culture blends with the individual cultures which each company's history has established.
I trust Adobe's corporate culture. Today it is made up of many Silicon Valley professionals, and there's a higher mortgages-per-capita ratio than at Macromedia, but I still see Adobe's original values clearly here. These values have been maintained by day-in, day-out decisions among many different working groups within the company. If things go wrong, Adobe will try to do right -- there are strong internal cultural pressures to do right -- that's what I see.
Microsoft's corporate culture is another known factor. For me, it gives a different impression -- the "knife the baby" story opened my eyes, the browser wars corroborated it, and other incidents have confirmed my observation of the culture there. Microsoft is a vital and influential member of our overall computing ecology, but I don't believe things just because they tell me so -- considering the group's history, I judge them by their actions, not by their speech.
But the corporate culture which scares me most is Google's. I don't personally associate with people who work there, and haven't even visited their campus, and so don't have any first-hand experience. But I've seen the rapid hiring they did over the past few years, and know that they pulled many, many people out of the general Silicon Valley culture, and I know that they've had dramatically increasing success the past few years with no downturns. Those are not good ingredients to make a sound company culture of their own.
As soon as there's a slowdown in ad growth, the conditions are ripe for implosion, siliconValleyistically. It's really scary that Google has web beacons on the majority of the Web's pages, controls the navigational reality of the majority of web searchers, and owns secret ad-personalization databases which are bigger than any FBI spying program ever could be. The only time that Google had to grow its corporate culture was in the heady days following their initial public stock offering, and they've added a whole lot of headcount since then. There may be a common glue and inner strength to the organization, but the way that they've grown suggests otherwise. I hope Google turns out okay, for all our sakes.
Individuals change the culture. The culture changes individuals. When considering what a group can do in the future, it is useful to look at its past.
I'm not sure what Stephen Elop will be able to achieve at Microsoft, but I believe it will be interesting to watch.
And here's hoping he improves the situation for rotisserie chicken up in Washington, too. ;-)
Posted by JohnDowdell at January 10, 2008 11:03 PM
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Comments
Low blow. Low blow! We got all of our Boston Markets taken away from us about 7 years ago. I have never recovered from it.
[jd sez: heh, it's hard on me too... there's a Boston Market about a half-mile from the offices here, too far for lunch, and if I get takeout to bring home for dinner, then I always feel guilty for the luscious aroma of rotisserie chicken wafting out over the 33-Ashbury on the way back.... ;-) ]
Posted by: Mike D. at January 11, 2008 09:38 AM
nice post.
Posted by: fabiopedrosa at January 11, 2008 01:37 PM
Wow. What a real interesting post. Very thorough too. I thought the "knife-the-baby" article was another disgusting display of Microsoft's bullying tactics.
It's sad but true. To see yet another CEO climb the ranks only to jump ship over to the competitor---and after receiving a large bonus associated with a merger. All too common.
In the military this would be considered treason, but corporate America--it's normal ops.
I'm sure Mr. Elop feels for his old corporate "family" as he sips his $10K bottle of wine plotting how to take down his previous "family".
As the world turns.
Posted by: marshall at January 11, 2008 05:52 PM
I've only just began this path in the corporate saga, but a year into Microsoft one thing is clear overall (Adobe, Google, Apple, Web 2.0 startups etc).
It's all just one big chess game. Trick is to try and keep emotion out of it. One book worth reading JD if you've not already read it is "Jennifer Government" (Max Barry). It's based off old school corporate brands, but there are a lessons to be learnt from it :)
-
Scott Barnes
RIA Evangelist
Microsoft.
P.S There are quite a few ex-Adobe/ex-Macromedia folks with whom I work with daily. Just goes to show today's one thing, tommorow could be another.
Posted by: Scott Barnes at January 13, 2008 04:54 AM
If you're interested in this "corporate culture" area, then you might want to read Jens Alfke, who is moving from Apple to independent development.
(I trace a lot of the lockdown to sites like ThinkSecret, where Apple was measurably damaged by the lack of goodfaith in others. Those types of leaks and NDA breaches are not victimless issues, and risk closing things off, as Apple has done.)
Posted by: John Dowdell at January 13, 2008 09:13 AM
It seems that every rose has its spines, as this guy testify when he left Adobe: Evan Robinson
[jd sez: Don't worry, be happy.]
Posted by: Emanuele Cipolloni at January 13, 2008 01:25 PM
I don't take cookies from strangers....
Posted by: Emanuele Cipolloni at January 14, 2008 12:37 AM
Boston Market hasn't had locations in Washington state since they filed for Chapter 11 in 1998. Which is kind of sad, since I'm a stone's throw away from one of their old locations, which is now, of course, a Starbucks. Anyway, these days the only thing I can eat there is their ham, since I'm allergic to poultry, and I haven't been happy with that either, the last few times I've been there. So, maybe it'd be better if he focused on Office instead. :)
Posted by: Matt May at January 14, 2008 01:19 PM
Interesting post. Corporate culture is a fascinating topic. In my experience it's very hard for people outside of a company to have a realistic view of what the culture is like inside. I suppose you can argue that what matters about corporate culture IS the external projection but I don’t agree with that. As a Microsoft employee of almost 13 years – long enough to have lived through the oft-mentioned “browser wars” – I believe that most external perceptions of Microsoft’s culture are distorted. They’re driven more by media coverage, gossip and cliché’
Even in the good old/bad old days in the mid 90's when Microsoft was growing like...Google...and entering the oft-mentioned and usually misunderstood "browser wars" the culture was tough but overall very positive. Yes, there were quite a few hard-core types who tried to show how hard core they were by using dumb language. A few made serious errors in judgment with respect to competition. But the vast majority of the people working at the company were and are good people who find language like "knife the baby" dumb and immature. Most people at Microsoft were and are motivated by doing cool things with software so that people and businesses can make the most of their lives.
Even the more famous “evil doers” who screwed up and got the company involved in the browser war fiasco were a lot less calculating then the media (or government) would lead you to believe. I was fairly well acquainted with a lot of the people who were knee deep in the evil browser wars. People like Brad Chase who ran Windows marketing before/during/after Windows 95, his lieutenant Yusuf Mehdi, Jim Allchin who ran Windows development for many years, many of the managers under Jim. Without exception they are were good people with their hearts in the right place.
The common perception seems to be that there was some kind of well organized conspiracy to screw competitors and consumers. The reality was that the company was a decentralized somewhat and chaotic place where individuals were empowered to make decisions - and often screwed up. The guy who supposedly made the “knife the baby” statement (which, by the way, came out in testimony 2nd hand) was a mid-level flunky who was responding just responding to words made by an Apple exec (“Do you want us to knife the baby?”).
Microsoft has matured a lot since those days. There are fewer testosterone-filled 25 year old MBA’s who are empowered to say stupid things. There is a more mature attitude toward how business should be conducted. Average employees are empowered and encouraged to speak up if they see business practices that they feel are inappropriate. But fundamentally the company is still a very decentralized place where individuals have a lot of leeway to do their own thing. It’s a company that is still run mostly by engineers. The focus is (in many ways to a fault) very focused on bits and bytes. If you’re ambitious, have brains and good ideas you can do whatever you want. And unfortunately – because the company is so big - if you want to be a cog in a wheel you may be able to disappear, get a nice paycheck and not contribute a lot.
Finally, I agree with your best point - individuals change cultures and cultures change individuals. With that in mind, you might want to think about whether you really know and understand the culture at Microsoft. As a softie, with very few exceptions I see a company filled with individuals who work here because they believe that software can have a positive impact on the lives of people and want to be part of it. Knifing babies almost never comes up. Only once or twice a week, max.
Posted by: MSFT Guy at January 15, 2008 09:43 AM
I am 61 and worked in sales (lowest on the food chain) in the legal publishing business for 18 years. In 1986 I broke protocol and spoke to the President of the company about what I saw coming in the emerging digitalization of print. At that time our company had a 65% market share. The culture was so embedded into the print media and the 1950 business motif, they were not able to hear me,(I am not a business prophet)which was a ego buster for me, however I could "see" it coming and begged them to start a migration project.
They went to 20% market share, and when they did change, we all lost our jobs to the a URL.
The irony of this, of course, I did not see this was going to affect my sales job.
So if you are in senior management and a employee, hired to clean floors, wants to talk with you.
Remember Nathan and the ass whom spoke Gods message via an ass.
Oh, and by the way,
Silicon Valley will have an earthquake in the 2nd quarter of 08
God's ass for the day
Ken
Posted by: Ken Lawson at January 21, 2008 08:46 AM