Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait with Cigar
Original Language Title: Selvportrett med sigar
(1908-1909)

" … nobody's pissed off Old Mary enough. Yet."

Thirty-three years ago this month, I went to work as a very junior consultant with a boutique Silicon Valley consulting firm. Our clients included most of the hot high-tech companies of the time, with Apple topping the long list. I'd gone from a middle management position in a regional mutual life insurance company to being an advisor to some of the best and brightest minds in the acknowledged finest high-tech companies. I found those minds to be largely unexceptional, for they seemed to be prey to the self-same delusions and misconceptions within which I'd caught myself dabbling. Something extraordinary happens whenever we engage in project work together. I had been working on an understanding of this mysterious something. That was a big reason I'd agreed to take that job, even though it gave me a pay cut and demanded that I travel four or five days each week. I sensed a considerable upside. If I could work with these great companies, perhaps I could learn their secret. Maybe I could even finally become proficient in the project work I'd failed to master over the prior decade.

Several of our clients were led by what I understood to be true industry icons. Apple's Steve Jobs might have been the most studied and worshipped CEO since Henry Ford, and there I was, working with the project team charged with bringing his latest dream to market. I was shocked to learn that while he was revered within that project team, he was perhaps more feared, for he possessed an epic temper. I learned from one of his most senior project managers that he was also a genuinely terrible manager. He was capricious and resolutely self-centered. He was still revered, for he was, after all, The Steve, as he was reverently referred to there. One lunchtime, when our workshop went to lunch at the One Infinite Loop Cafeteria, The Steve was there with his son. I swear that everyone in my group stood about two inches taller when they heard The Steve was present. Many started "mugging for the camera," apparently hoping that The Steve might glimpse them and thereby maybe improve their fortune. It was a breathtaking lunch for me.

Back into the workshop, the stories began to come out of how it had become everyone's job to somehow prevent The Steve from ruining the product they were laboring to launch. Sure, as CEO, The Steve proposed strategic direction. He chose which features would be pursued in which version. He set the target completion date to match what he conceived as the market's desire. In practice, he performed little market research. He often relied upon his gut, his sense of propriety, to decide which options to choose. His choices weren't necessarily coherent and didn't remain stable over time. They might morph without notice. Eleventh-hour specs often undermined delivery date expectations. It wasn't yet clear at that time whether Apple would survive the upcoming battle with Microsoft. There was much uncertainty. Over late-night beers with that senior project manager, I learned that he felt like he was living in a terrorist state. His engineering team, one of the very best in the world, was continually undermined by intrusions of genius from the top. He had reframed his job as being to prevent The Steve from undermining his team's efforts. Needless to say, he got screamed at a lot.

I learned from one of the consulting firm's senior partners that The Steve had almost run him down when he was biking along Saratoga Road. He didn't even slow down.

This would only be my first brush with The CEO Disease, where the myth surrounding a specific person seemed to eclipse the reality surrounding them. Jobs was a God in the trades. His reputation was transcendent and golden. His reality was almost entirely unlike his mythos. Apple was born from Jobs' considerable inspiration. It survived pretty much despite him. A remarkably dedicated cadre of people who actually believed his dream made it come true. The original dreamer was more encumbrance to success than its proximal cause. Yet his myth persists. He will be remembered as the epic character he was, one in a billion, and an inspiration to every budding tech executive since. Because of my senior project manager friend and his team, and many others like him, Apple survived until it could assimilate a more practical CEO, which they finally did after the Sculley fiasco, with Tim Cook, who finally managed to bring some engineering discipline to the dream.

Now, we see a so-called CEO culture attempting to take over our federal government. Investigate the characters involved, and you'll find remarkable similarities to the myth embodied in Steve Jobs. He was not as advertised, though those distanced from the gravitational center might never have received that memo. Our federal government was deliberately founded not to depend on a king or its modern corporate counterpart, the CEO. Contrary to popular misconception, modern corporations are much less dependent upon charismatic leaders than competent middle managers and dedicated team members. Charismatic leaders serve their purpose. They attract capital and take credit for the efforts contributed by a dizzying collection of professionals who organize themselves more as communities than hierarchies. The people responsible for delivering something couldn't care less for the politics involved in creating public perception, though they depend on it. The CEOs plotting the takeover of our for-the-people government couldn't so much as cut a check without the willing assistance of someone who volunteers their dedication without ever expecting to get rich for her efforts.

Should the CEOs succeed in turning our economy into a centrally controlled hierarchy, our economy will seize up like an engine lacking oil. The system's lubrication comes from something other than a chief executive's explicit direction, and not a CEO alive carries the actual understanding of how to create or maintain anything. Their job was to inspiringly dream. So-called lesser beings always performed engineering, marketing, and accounting. Rule one was always Don't Piss Off The Old Marys, the middle-aged women who couldn't make it past the glass ceilings and so settled into absolutely controlling the company via the internal accounting system or something similar. If you think Mary doesn't know how to stall the system, piss her off enough. That any large organization continues operating means that nobody's pissed off Old Mary enough. Yet.

(This will be the first of several installments within this NextWorld Series, considering The CEO Disease.)

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz