And here is an example of how to ruin a company

Hewlett-Packard: Worst Board Ever?
[Via Daring Fireball]

Shira Ovide, writing for the WSJ, runs down the track record of HP’s board over the last decade. Every time you think they’ve hit rock bottom, they find a way to make things even worse.

[More]

The Board at HP has been doing a pretty poor job. But then they pretty much have since David Packard left the Board in 1993.

It is always a good thing when the CEO is ‘of’ the company

Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research calls Steve Jobs’ patents a lesson for CEOs
[Via AppleInsider]

Steve Jobs’ name wasn’t just slapped on a variety of Apple patents, but rather the depth of his contributions as chief executive of Apple offers a lesson for other leaders.

[More]

The best companies are often run by people that are ‘of’ the company. That is, the come from and inhabit the ethos of the company itself, especially with its main reason for existence.

So they are often engineers at a company that build cars or programers from companies that create programs or supply chain experts in a company that assembles devices by the millions.

They are often not just salesmen or marketers, who more often than not, come from outside this core aspect of the community.

Jobs, while never a programmer himself, knew how to get people to create the software he wanted. While never a developer himself, he got the designs he wanted.

And we know he was able to accomplish this by being an imbedded part of the community and culture. You just have to read the stories about him at Apple to see this.

Over 300 patents is amamzing ofr a man whose expertise was really his Renaissance man ability to impact almost all aspcts of the company. He was not some passive CEO, focussed purely on sales.

He was not only able to work with the real experts in ways that permitted him to  be on the patents, but he was able to do it in a way that did not tick off the experts too much.

Because one of the more amazing things is that for such a supposedly jerk of a guy, there are a lot of senior staff at Apple that have been there a long time – some following him over from NeXt.

These guys could go anywhere. Yet they stayed at Apple.

And that will be the key thing to watch out for Tim Cook – how well he can retain these same people.