I am sorry you have never worked anywhere like it. For over 10 years, the company grew like gangbusters. It transformed a whole industry. It grew from under 50 people to 5000. It made hundreds of millionaires.
It is a massively self-evident fact that a lot more money was made during the “principles” period than after. And the company outperformed its rivals to the point that it was able to acquire competitors with twice as many employees. If “money to be made” is your core objective, you should strive to be more like Creo in the decade that ended a year before its demise.
Decades after the company disappeared, it has a very active LinkedIn Group and people are singing its praises online. If you are right that it was so “toxic”, this is a strange legacy. Interestingly, the core technologies developed by Creo are also still very much alive and, as a very rare example in technology, have not been surpassed technically nor replaced in the market. Technology moved very fast at Creo but their tech has stayed virtually unchanged under Kodak. Amazing.
Where I work now, we do at least three M&A deals a year ( as the acquirer ). I have many ideas about M&A. My ideas about leadership are still very firmly planted and aligned with what I experienced at Creo.
> It is a massively self-evident fact that a lot more money was made during the “principles” period than after.
Is it though? I've seen a lot of claims about this or that management style or company structure to be responsible for huge profits and growth. It's usually a more simple explanation, such as market timing + smart people. Ultimately it's survivor bias. It could be argued that if this were really the case, all top companies would be using it by now.
But that last sentence is the Creo supporters whole argument - self interested management get much more out of rent seeking in a nice profitable company while seeing their hierarchy position reinforcing their social
Status- in short as long as everyone keeps being “performative hierarchical management” and looking like they do a good job, there is no incentive to actually do a better job
If we are talking “founders”, the two Creo founders made hundreds of millions of dollars when the company sold. Long before that though, they gave away a third of the company to a guy they named as second CEO. Then the original CEO biked around China for a year while that guy made him that fortune. The two founders pooled their shares and then split it three ways with the new guy ( second CEO ). Many rank-and-file employees made millions as well. It was a different set of folks.
I am not sure how many hundreds of millions you have made but their way seemed to work.
I've run many teams like this and have generally received good feedback from my teams. It's pretty simple in my experience. Don't punish people for making generally sound decisions that end in failure. Reward them for decisions that end in success. The issue is that managers need to eat some of the risk of those failures although it is offset by the benefit of the team's successes. Few managers are actually able to do this versus trying to dump all the risk somewhere else (usually onto their teams). But if you can maintain a management layer like that then it's amazing.
No problem. I am not sure what we are disagreeing about.
The company was amazing. No offense but it is not important to convince you of that. And you are certainly not going to convince me that my experience or the stories told by hundreds of others are false.
You could be trying to convince me that management does not matter, as my core claim is that it does. If that is what we are disagreeing about, I would like to know more. Great ideas can come from anywhere but I want to stay evidence driven. It is the only way I know how after working at Creo.
You keep explaining imagined features of an alternate reality where the people who worked there actually hated it.
This isn't an abstract thought exercise. You're talking to someone who worked there, so it comes across as irrelevant to imagine people who hated the politics.
I agree with you generally that abstractly one should discount claims of lack of politics. founder soul, founder, sold it, Google for 7 years, then founding again.
This isn't reddit. People will downvote and flag far reaching toxically negative comments about a company the poster has no actual experience with. As they should.
Throttle because of your arrogance and poor assumptions based on thinking your reality is everyone else's? Boo fucking hoo. Stay in your sad world and we'll stay in ours.
