To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.
Also the 707 tail was extended by 40ft to give it better minimum ground speed control, this was retroactively applied to already built planes. Very interesting to see how this was applied in the past with a lawyer at the helm vs the current ceo during the launch of the 737Max
Adding 12 meters to an aircraft is quite a big change.
Although the Wikipedia article cites the UK ARB as the influence, it was also in response to the 1959 crash [1] of a 707 being used for training, in which Dutch roll was induced and later became so violent it ripped 3 engines off the wings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_cra...
Both the 707 and 747 were "bet the company" projects, in particular the 747 pushed Boeing to the brink of bankruptcy. However both were major successes because they took a gamble on the future of the aviation industry.
In these days of "fiduciary responsibility" it's difficult to imagine any public company taking that kind of risk. Risk is what should make returns.
It means, when you see a sign that says an exception, "no parking Wednesdays between 8 and 12", it proves the rule that parking is allowed otherwise.
The exception of a lawyer being a good CEO does not, in any way, prove that lawyers are not good CEOs .
The examples of legal signs and so on are a more specific, technical, meaning that is only used in certain contexts, such as actual legal proceedings or at least informal discussions about laws or contract terms.
When /u/flkiwi above said this phrase, they obviously meant it in the joking sense I gave, and which they had actually explained above. They agree that, in general, lawyers make bad CEOs, but they also personally know of exceptions. This is not "wrong usage", as proven by the fact that everyone who read the comment understood exactly what they meant.
This whole thing reminds me of the people who complain about the use of literally as an amplifier instead of for its primary meaning as "wrong", with seemingly no understanding of how flourishes and rhetoric work (nor even of the history of words like "very", which used to be quite similar to "literally" a long time ago).
The idea that there was some point in history were the pointer target was officially designated to be x is just false. That point in time never existed.
[All] lawyers are bad CEOs is a statement that was made. Evidence to the contrary was presented. "The exception proves the rule" was used to dismiss that evidence.
It's used in a similar way as "God works in mysterious ways".
Similarly an exception like a lawyer being a good ceo does not prove a rule like lawyers are bad CEOs. It's nonsense. People who don't understand the proverb took it and misused it and then others took after them and here we are, I've been wondering about that proverb my entire life and I never understood how it makes any sense. Now I finally do, and I'm glad the other commenter clarified it
If you research this, as well as the customer as always right as you claim, you will find no evidence of their longer ‘original’ forms [1].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/articles/468815/customer-is-always-ri...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right
There’s some quibbling to be had about the meaning, but it puts it closer to “assume good faith” or something like that, rather than reducing it to just preferences.
> The earliest known printed mention of the phrase is a September 1905 article in the Boston Globe about Field, which describes him as "broadly speaking" adhering to the theory that "the customer is always right".
> However, John William Tebbel was of the opinion that Field never himself actually said such a thing, because he was "no master of idiom". Tebbel rather believed it probable that what Field would have actually said was "Assume the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not."
I don't dispute that people use it that way but it's objectively a misuse. The phrase's misuse implies that evidence against a statement supports the statement.
> In many uses of the phrase, however, the existence of an exception is taken to more definitively 'prove' a rule to which the exception does not fit.
> In what Fowler describes as the "most objectionable" variation of the phrase,[1] this sort of use comes closest to meaning "there is an exception to every rule", or even that the presence of an exception makes a rule more true; these uses Fowler attributes to misunderstanding.
Try to understand that there is no individual ownership over turns of phrase, and that they tend to shift around over time. Bugs Bunny turned Nimrod from a byword for a competent hunter into an insult.
This is natural and all of your favorite words have or will be subject to it as long as there are humans to communicate with them.
Btw, let me add my personal pet peeve: "egregiously" somehow went from meaning "very good" to mean "very bad" in American English.
In my native language "egregiamente" still has the original meaning so I was confused for a long time.
The original meaning of 'prove' was more like 'test'. The original sense was therefore opposite to this.
Imagine you got a parking ticket on Tuesday. What would your defense in court be?
the rule is that the parking is allowed; the exception is that it's not allowed on Wednesdays; they didn't bother spelling out "parking is allowed at all other times except"
Read for what was intended by the author and you’ll learn more.
> That's weird because this one was good
> Ah an exception to the rule. That proves it, lawyers are bad CEOs!
Is that not what was intended by the author?
I don't really care but but when I found out the actual meaning of the phrase (the usage of which never really made sense to me), it made a lot more sense to me. I thought it was interesting.
I'd also argue that "it's harmless" is not always accurate. It's usage dismisses counter-evidence to a statement. Depending on the case, it may or may not be harmless.
If a company is dying (aka winding down), you most likely do in fact want a lawyer in charge, whatever their job title may be. For instance why would you put a scientist or engineer in charge of negotiating your acquisition?
It's a great proverb and in particular the "accountants in charge to extract maximum value after maturity, lawyers in charge at the end to wind it down or sell it off" part is accurate of many businesses in general. No company gets to live in the startup and growth stages forever. At a certain point shareholders decide to get everything they can out of their investment and move on.
And yes professions have stereotypical personalities. Like the used car salesman.
Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession.
I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors?
It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-dime it does on everything it ends up paying lawyers, fines and damages. I wonder how they manage to see this as good business. Or maybe they hope that "the next" time they'll score big without any penalties?
It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.
It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X
Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them.
Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
But Symbian didn't have any roots in Linux. It came from the Psion organiser line originally (and specifically the 5/7 series, not the earlier 3's).
Damn, I really miss the N900. I was seriously using it as recently as about 4-5 years ago.
Even today it looks better than any of the major mobile OSs, is more responsive and just _feels_ better to hold and use.
The road not taken.
When you look at where most Nokia customers defected to, it is Samsung and Android.
An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded.
I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
The first crash was already too late for them. A team that behaved so callously earlier wasn't going to stop at that point without an external intervention. They were in fact attempting to scapegoat the pilots even after the second crash. Therefore, putting the blame on one CEO at the time of the first crash is illogical. The blame must fall on the team that established such an unbelievably flawed safety culture in the first place. Who was that? And why?
I'm not insisting that accountants and lawyers are unfit for top management. There are corporate portfolios that they're the best fit for - like accounting and law firms. Then there are the exceptions who do a sensible job even outside their portfolio. But I have seen both engineering heavy and accounting heavy managements. As expected, their priorities and operational philosophies are drastically different. But their influence doesn't end there. They also define the wider company culture - A culture that not even a CEO can change without significant personal effort against institutional inertia.
So, accountants or lawyers may be sufficient to lead IT companies. But if they choose to lead an industry where so many lives are at stake, they better hold back their profit-seeking instincts and understand the safety culture and the consequences of their decisions damn well.
You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions.
And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.