No Love Lost between Ballmer and… Well Everybody

It seems not Wall Street, nor even Microsoft employees will miss Steve Ballmer.  After the announcement that Ballmer will be retiring within the next year, Wall Street said YIPPY Party Time !!!!  M$ stock jumped up.

Meantime, not even Microsoft employees will miss the big teddy bear.  It seems Big B was more bear than teddy to his employees.  It seems Ballmer’s management style killed innovation and sent employees running out the door.

Wall Street says YIPPY !!!

The Motley Fool had this to say:

“Shares of Microsoft had one of their best performances in years on news that longtime CEO Steve Ballmer would be relinquishing his grip on the software giant at some point in the next year. If you weren’t aware (or couldn’t have guessed), Ballmer was a divisive figure, largely because of Microsoft’s scant returns during his decade-plus at the helm. To be sure, Microsoft’s last 13 years have seen their fair share of embarrassments.”

Yahoo! Finance weighed with this.

“Shares of Microsoft rallied more than 7 percent last Friday after CEO Steve Ballmer announced his retirement. Ballmer…has largely been blamed for the tech giant’s poor long-term stock performance and the company’s dearth of innovative products and services.”

Employees Run Screaming

Ballmer (aka Monkey Boy) used an employee evaluation system, known as “stack ranking”, based on an idea from Jack Welch of GE fame.  Nice work B.  Run a tech company like it’s old school.  Party Like It’s 1999 !!!  Brilliant.

Slate reports on The Poisonous Employee-Ranking System That Helps Explain Microsoft’s Decline.

“…employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate.”

“Ballmer was inadvertently encouraging his (employees) to spend a good chunk of their time playing office politics. Why try to outrun the bear when you can just tie your co-workers’ shoelaces?”

This explains a WHOLE lot !!!  Discourage innovation, collaboration and risk taking and you kill a company.  The only reason it’s taking so long to die is because M$ has had a monopoly for so long and used unethical business practices to get it and keep it.

The only question now is, did Ballmer kill it for good ?  Maybe, Yeah.

If you see stack ranking or Welch thinking at a company  —  RUN !!!!

“As the Journal and others have noted, what seemed to work for Welch—for a time, anyway—has produced some ugly results elsewhere. Even GE phased the system out following Welch’s departure.”