Exec Quotes

Did television execs have souls? Now, that was an existential question and a half.

Mothers are so important. I came across a cable network exec who once told me they don't matter. Well, I disagree. Mothers matter a lot. Without mothers, there wouldn't be people. And mothers watch a lot of the programs on that cable network. No wonder why that network is barely surviving. - Strong by Kailin Gow on Mothers, Knowing Your Viewers, and Strong Leadership

About 20 years ago I told an Exec to tell her friend, an Exec at a big entertainment company that they should develop a video library where anyone can pull up a film or tv show when they want to, from home. This was before Video On Demand. Before Netflix went streaming. Before Amazon Video and Hulu. That entertainment company I told about my vision for a VOD-type of service to was Blockbuster. But because I was a very young Executive, a woman, and Asian; they didn't listen. Look where Blockbuster is now. - Don't take Good Advice for Granted. Futurist - Kailin Gow

When I ducked out, she was talking to Ana Whitney and some Roarke exec about knitting. The three of them were into it like it was their religion.

But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.

Shock? More like shellshock at this point. Blondie knew I was gay, yet he was a Company Exec or else he wouldn’t be here. I was his butt boy in the worst possible way. When I squinted at him, he gave nothing up. Neither did I. I had shit on this newly minted man too. Double fucking jeopardy, jackass.

You can’t talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.

There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary "public.

The execs were tough on him. All day he’d absorb their poison like a sponge, and at night, he’d wring it all out on me.

No one really knows anything about comedy. We know a little bit about what we’re doing, but as far as the industry—the exec branch—they don’t know how it happens.

[Alec asked his agent John Burnham at William Morris if he was being shunned by Hollywood execs] 'It's not that when they think of you they hate you. They don't think of you at all.

Just because politicians, scientists, and business execs are raging about it, and newspaper headlines are screaming it, doesn’t mean the message sticks—or that people care. It takes more than that to change a culture. In

The worst part was that the Brit’s reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley’s board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell’s schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle.

This whole, crazy fucking business can be reduced to one little word, one word explains it all. I'm going to give you the benefit of my experience and share that word with you, buck. It's revenge.... Them studio execs, agents, producers, they're all sweaty, unpopular, bitter little fucks, and now it's their turn. They get to make all of us golden boys and girls jump through hoops. They decide who's popular and who isn't, who's pretty and who isn't, who gets their phone calls returned and who doesn't. They make us grovel, submit, suck up to them. They're getting back at us, man. It means more to them than the money, the fame, the glamor, having power over guys like me.... It's what they live for.

Continually thinking of oneself as a bum, a mean old man, a strapping youth, a mothering person, a hot business exec, a cute young thing, a man on the go, a rebel, smarter than most, a refined sort, a dark soul, a victim of circumstance, special and unique, and on and on, will cause us to become very attached to these images and roles. We tend to think they are simply assessments of what is so, but they’re not. They are fabrications within one’s mind and they exist to serve some end.

Samantha: Listen, you need to get your head around the demographics of this place. So first of all you’ve got your blue collars—tradies, we call them. We’ve got a lot of tradies in Pirriwee. Like my Stu. Salt of the earth. Or salt of the sea, because they all surf, of course. Most of the tradies grew up here and never left. Then you’ve got your alternative types. Your dippy hippies. And in the last ten years or so, all these wealthy execs and banker wankers have moved in and built massive McMansions up on the cliffs. But! There’s only one primary school for all our kids! So at school events you’ve got a plumber, a banker and a crystal healer standing around trying to make conversation. It’s hilarious. No wonder we had a riot.

But if there's one thing to learn from corporate execs, it's this: even if they aren't about to claim Anonymous's imagery for their next advertising campaign, it doesn't mean they can't, or won't, find some way of appropriating *something* about Anonymous. If someone can find an uncapitalized, exploitable, futurescanned, innovative, disruptive idea that can flourish in corporate boardrooms, they will.

REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure. JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at Apple in 1997. MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.

Similar to Christ’s, rap’s mission is self-esteem for those “previously deemed shit.” So it’s as dangerous as Christ’s. Because a lot of kids of all manner are listening, and no one in the industry wants their top floors threatened by either the wrong skin color or the wrong mindset—that is, anyone who cares about truth. Kids are the market, but you have to keep them believing they’re worth less than the stars or they won’t think they need what stars are selling. Wait till you see. When showbiz execs realize they can’t kill rap, they will hijack it. They’ll make millionaires of impostor rappers who say things like “You can’t be like me.

We took enough depth charge damage that I decided we had no choice but to go up and fight him with our deck gun.” Jarvis grinned, “Our skipper likes to do that too. Charge into battle with guns blazing.” Williams and the Admiral smiled, but Turner noted that neither of the S-52 officers did. Waters only lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply before continuing. “Yeah, but you’ve got a fancy new fleet boat,” Waters replied to Jarvis, sounding a little miffed. “We’re in an old pig boat with a single four-inch. I sent my Exec and COB up top with gun crews and machine gunners to harass the destroyer. He cut us up pretty bad before a lucky shot from our deck gun hit his fantail and detonated the ashcans there… sunk the bastard,

My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.” “To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.” “Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.” “Show me an incumbent bigco failing to adapt to change, I’ll show you top execs paid huge cash compensation for quarterly and annual goals.” “Every billionaire suffers from the same problem. Nobody around them ever says, ‘Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid.’” “‘Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.’—Peter Lynch

You began receiving the texts in late September, after the first date. You wore the translucent dress with the high collar and open-shoulder sleeves that made you feel like you were a fashion writer for a New York magazine, or a high-powered exec of a Fortune 500 company: a shimmering butterfly, someone who mattered, not a barely-eighteen college freshman who spent most evenings in her dorm room slurping Top Ramen. The first guy was forty-five. His wife was the same old song on the radio. He took you out for lobster and fried oysters. Afterwards, he grabbed your neck like you owed him something, and you closed your eyes and imagined pretty things: white-gold ribbons of sunlight skimming the belly of oceans, the sequins falling from your prom dress the first time you slept with a guy, movies where everyone sings soprano and defies the laws of flight.

Focus on the user… and the money will follow. This can be particularly challenging in environments where the user and customer are different, and when your customer doesn’t share your focus-on-the-user ethos. When Google acquired Motorola in 2012, one of the first Motorola meetings Jonathan attended was a three-hour product review, where the company’s managers presented the features and specifications for all of Motorola’s phones. They kept referring to the customer requirements, most of which made little sense to Jonathan since they were so out of tune with what he knew mobile users wanted. Then, over lunch, one of the execs explained to him that when Motorola said “customers,” they weren’t talking about the people who use the phones but about the company’s real customers, the mobile carriers such as Verizon and AT&T, who perhaps weren’t always as focused on the user as they should have been. Motorola wasn’t focusing on its users at all, but on its partners. At Google, our users are the people who use our products, while our customers are the companies that buy our advertising and license our technology. There are rarely conflicts between the two, but when there are, our bias is toward the user. It has to be this way, regardless of your industry. Users are more empowered than ever, and won’t tolerate crummy products.

Remarkably, in the vast majority of companies (not the ones that are good at product), the actual product teams don't do much ideation themselves. This is because what's really going on is that the ideas are already handed to the product teams in the form of prioritized features on product roadmaps, where most of the items on those roadmaps are coming either from requests from big customers (or prospective customers), or from company stakeholders or execs. Unfortunately, these are rarely the quality of ideas we're looking for.

This is because what's really going on is that the ideas are already handed to the product teams in the form of prioritized features on product roadmaps, where most of the items on those roadmaps are coming either from requests from big customers (or prospective customers), or from company stakeholders or execs. Unfortunately, these are rarely the quality of ideas we're looking for. In general, if the product team is given actual business problems to solve rather than solutions, and the product team does their job and interacts directly and frequently with actual users and customers, then getting a sufficient quantity and quality of product ideas is not really a problem.

Any political party that fails to fire or to get rid of its corrupt members. It is highly that those members were not acting on their own capacity or interest, but they were following orders from the party committee or execs.

That probably means something to someone from the last century. The HAL reference also. The execs are always trying to throw in callbacks to their latest blockbuster remakes of once-great movies that have been rebooted to death.

This book should be in the briefcase of every exec in the world and should be pulled out every day for a refresher on how to be a real leader.

think two cops sucking hard at Hollywood’s tit are in no position to be giving me any shit for offering a courtesy to a studio exec.

The critical partners are aligned not according to exclusion but rather by nonexclusivity: their goal, rather than “not Apple,” was “not only Apple.” Spotify, as a focused, fragile, undernourished startup, was the perfect alternative. It presented a much better option than staying under Apple’s thumb, or suffering under a similar giant. As one senior music exec put it, “The last place most of us want streaming to end up is a straight fight between Apple and Google.

Corporate execs and rich jerks aren’t always smart. They don’t have to be. They pay other people to be smart for them, and half the time don’t listen anyway.

I’m talking about the video. At Kwangtaek.” My breath catches in my throat as he continues. “I know you and Yujin planned the whole thing so you could get attention from the execs. How is that any different from what I did? I thought when I explained this all to you, you would understand.

Baron said that Bezos “didn’t try to reinvent the paper; he tried to capture what made it special.” But Bezos did try to reinvent the systems behind the paper, with a flood of Amazon-style rituals. The Pancake Group, which occasionally expanded to include finance and audience development execs, spoke to Bezos every other week on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. EST for an hour. Bezos asked Post managers to “bring me new things”; he wanted to see everything, including changes in pricing and how to expand the paper’s audience and revenue, in the form of six-page Amazon-style narratives, subject to Bezos’s careful reading and detailed questions.

It’s a sad fact of life, Cage, that we’re not very good at this sort of thing in our country. Politicians, useless NHS managers, chief execs who swindle their shareholders and rob the pension pot – they all get very generous golden goodbyes, but those who risk their lives, or fight for their country, or spend their lives working in the shadows, or give up the chance of a normal life, those who actually do serve, selflessly and with dedication – well, they don’t.

She’d tried everything—setups, apps, a matchmaker that cost way too much money and who connected her with only one guy, a grumpy ad exec who was five foot four.

On the other hand," the exec continued, "I've seen pirates do some pretty stupid things over the years.

The first category needs to be done, the second needs to be planned for, the third can be delegated, and the final category doesn’t need to be handled. However, with the neurodivergent brain, since there’s no “assistant,” everything winds up on the exec’s desk vying for their attention. As a result, either the wrong thing gets done, or nothing gets done at all.

Learn how to give a great demo. This is an especially important skill to use with customers and key execs. We're not trying to teach them how to operate the product, and we're not trying to do a user test on them. We're trying to show them the value of what we're building. A demo is not training, and it's not a test. It's a persuasive tool. Get really, really good at it.

It was like watching a pair of Hollywood execs abuse each other—you had to be powerful to take the abuse with a laugh.

Do you know Ron Tracy?” Gary said to me one day over breakfast. “Met him for five seconds when he took over the Republic,” I said. “He’s taking command of the Exeter. Offered me helmsman.” “I thought Mendez offered you exec on the Astral Queen.” “So?” Gary said. “So the word is he’s going to make commodore soon. You’d be in position to get command.” “No guarantee of that,” Gary said, “and if you offer me exec somewhere,

but still doesn't do what we wanted. In that case, how can you see the command output? You can use the logoutput attribute. How to do it… Follow these steps in order to log command output: Define an exec resource with the logoutput parameter as shown in the following code snippet: exec { 'misbehaving-command':   command   => '/bin/cat /etc/hostname',   logoutput => true, }

Relentless Innovation author Jeffrey Phillips favors a possibly apocryphal line from Einstein. The story is that Einstein was asked how he would tackle a particularly tough problem—saving the world, in some tellings—if he had only an hour to do so.6 Einstein’s approach? He’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it. That is, Phillips says, just about the opposite of what executives normally do. He paints a picture of harried execs deciding immediately on a solution, launching into its implementation, and then cooling down with email. It’s all task, task, task—symptomatic of a work culture that’s getting too busy to innovate, that’s become infatuated with efficiency. We might be doing with our time, but are we developing?

but the idea of paying someone an hourly rate to use his studio to work on songs for his album, for which you wouldn’t receive royalties, is absurd.

Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance.

Startups demand execs who are comfortable with uncertainty, chaos and change—with presentations and offers changing daily,

Anti–Second Amendment advocates profess to love science while demonizing people of faith, but you’d never know this by their arguments. Bloomberg PR exec/mom Shannon Watts-Troughton once told me via Twitter that “an assault weapon enables humans to shoot 10 rounds in one minute. @blueelephant69: @shannonrwatts @DLoesch.” What in flat-earthing hell is this? I can throw ten bowling balls a minute, I have assault arms, ban them. By her estimation, “assault weapons” are any firearms that can shoot ten rounds per minute, which is every firearm. Even a bolt action rifle can shoot ten rounds per minute. That

Using threads also allows us to avoid the fork-without-exec POSIX issues that Python’s multiprocessing brings,

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

Take “Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence,” which was Enron’s motto. If execs at Enron had decided to replace those concepts with something different—perhaps Greed, Greed, Lust for Money, and Greed—it might have drawn a few chuckles but otherwise there would have been no impact. On the other hand, one of Google’s stated values has always been to “Focus on the User.” If we changed that, perhaps by putting the needs of advertisers or publishing partners first, our inboxes would be flooded, and outraged engineers would take over the weekly, company-wide TGIF meeting (which is hosted by Larry and Sergey, and where employees are welcome to—and often do—voice their disagreement with company decisions). Employees always have a choice, so belie your values at your own risk.

Well, I had to choose between God and a bunch of sales execs. I carried on praying, of course.’ He

The  number of children in foster care right now is the highest it’s ever been. As it encouraged  adoption, ASFA made it easier than ever to take children from their parents  just because those parents are poor.” --Richard Wexler, Exec. Director, National Coalition Child Protection Reform.

Jesus, look at that idiot!" Waters' exec muttered, and the citizen captain shook his head in disgust. Having

These fools, these execs and their underlings, with their enemies’ lists and Espo informers, they’re creating just the sort of climate to make their worst fears come real. The prophecy fulfills itself; if we weren’t talking about life and death here, it would make a grand joke!

Don’t follow competition We are constantly amazed by how much business leaders obsess about their competition. When you get in a room with a bunch of senior execs from large companies, their attention can often wander as they check smartphones and think about the rest of their day, but bring up the topic of their competition and suddenly you’ll have everyone’s full attention. It’s as if, once you get to a particular level in an organization, you worry as much about what your competition is doing as how your own organization is performing. At the highest echelons of business, the default mentality is, too often, siege. This fixation leads to a never-ending spiral into mediocrity. Business leaders spend much of their time watching and copying the competition, and when they do finally break away and try something new, they are careful risk-takers, developing only incremental, low-impact changes. Being close to your competition offers comfort; it’s like covering tactics in match race sailing, when the lead boat tacks whenever the follower does, to ensure that the follower doesn’t go off in a different direction and find stronger wind. Incumbents clump together so that no one finds a fresher breeze elsewhere. But as Larry Page says, how exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?85 If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative. While you and your competitors

The channel?” he exclaimed. “We lost two billion dollars last year! Who gives a fuck about the channel?” Steve perked up. “You,” he said, pointing at the senior exec, “are wrong. And you,” he continued, looking at Cue, “are right.” By the end of the meeting, he had asked Cue and O’Connor to create an online store where buyers could customize their purchases—and to have it completed in two months.

we didn’t know what was impossible. Neither, apparently, did he: He was among the first to believe that Hollywood movie execs would care a fig about what was happening in academia.

According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, only 15 percent of executives say their meetings with salespeople met their expectations. From that, only 7 percent of execs actually scheduled follow-up conversations.

Google exec's death By Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY | 308 words

A celeb is only a celeb if you remember them. It’s like we disappear if no one is paying any attention. We think we have all the power, but it’s actually the public who decides, just like with politicians. Except it’s really the record and movie execs and probably a few guys in a room in Washington, D.C., who control the purse strings and give the public the next number-one Billboard singer and movie star and president, but they make it seem like the public chose it so no one gets too upset.

the OGX exec, told a story about how Eike stayed home sick from work once. He spent the day in bed. The next day when he showed up at the office, he said, “You’re all fucked. I didn’t sleep well, and I wrote up twenty-seven new business ideas that we need to get cracking on right away.” Eike

for Wainaina, Afropolitanism has become the marker of crude cultural commodification—a phenomenon increasingly “product driven,” design focused, and “potentially funded by the West.” Through an Afropolitan lens, “travel is easy” and “people are fluid.” Certainly, magazines, designers, and business execs have seized the term for their own purposes.

If you think the movie moguls are worried about the possible disastrous effects of TV, you ought to hold the head of a radio exec for a while,

sending of log messages to all logged users. However, that default configuration is not enough to allow the user to see the log messages. The user must also issue the terminal monitor EXEC command during the login session, which tells IOS that this terminal session would like to receive log messages.

Storing Log Messages for Later Review With logging to the console and to terminals, an event happens, IOS sends the messages to the console and terminal sessions, and then IOS can discard the message. However, clearly, it would be useful to keep a copy of the log messages for later review, so IOS provides two primary means to keep a copy. IOS can store copies of the log messages in RAM by virtue of the logging buffered global configuration command. Then any user can come back later and see the old log messages by using the show logging EXEC command. As a second option—an option used frequently in production networks—all devices store their log messages centrally to a syslog server. RFC 5424 defines the Syslog protocol, which provides the means by which a device like a switch or router can use a UDP protocol to send messages to a syslog server for storage. All devices can send their log messages to the server. Later, a user can connect to the server (typically with a graphical user

Storing Log Messages for Later Review With logging to the console and to terminals, an event happens, IOS sends the messages to the console and terminal sessions, and then IOS can discard the message. However, clearly, it would be useful to keep a copy of the log messages for later review, so IOS provides two primary means to keep a copy. IOS can store copies of the log messages in RAM by virtue of the logging buffered global configuration command. Then any user can come back later and see the old log messages by using the show logging EXEC command. As a second option—an option used frequently in production networks—all devices store their log messages centrally to a syslog server. RFC 5424 defines the Syslog protocol, which provides the means by which a device like a switch or router can use a UDP protocol to send messages to a syslog server for storage. All devices can send their log messages to the server. Later, a user can connect to the server (typically with a graphical user interface) and browse the log messages from various devices. To configure a router or switch to send log messages to a syslog server, add the logging {address|hostname} global command, referencing the IP address or hostname of the syslog server. Figure 33-2 shows the ideas behind the buffered logging and syslog logging.

They fear being forced into some unflattering or dangerous archetype that the world told them they’d be if they expressed the faintest glimmer of rage. The bitter ex, the stressed-out mom, the bossy exec, the man-hating feminist – the countless racist or sexist cliches that would be tossed at them for getting angry at the systemic injustices of the world (because misogyny has a thousand words for “unhinged bitch” but not a single one for “multiple female orgasm”).

If you want to be nice, get me an Uber.” Thank God. “Sure.” “Exec only, Nate. It’s bad enough I’m going to be seen leaving here. Don’t make me suffer further by being cheap.

It quickly became apparent to the execs that Musk lacked basic knowledge of the merger agreement he had signed.

The flourishing of this syndrome has helped cultivate another tech myth: that of “exceptionalism,” in which unicorn founders, execs, early hires, and certain VCs, who have all drunk deeply from the Kool-Aid, believe that because the world is a meritocratic place, they and they alone are responsible for their success, due to the fact that they are smarter and work harder than anyone else. The trouble with that theory is that it is demonstrably untrue in the vast majority of cases, not least because while, yes, they may be smart and work hard, they are also the beneficiaries of a once-in-a-century alignment of circumstances, ranging from the development of the internet itself to the Wild West–style “lawlessness” of the Valley, which was left free to roam far ahead of governments, regulators, and tax codes, to today's unprecedented surfeit of venture capital and scale culture.

I can’t stand Martin in PR. He says things like, “Let’s action that” in meetings, and clicks his fingers at Ruby, who is a marketing exec, but who Martin seems to think is his personal assistant. He’s only twenty-three but has decided it will further his merciless pursuit of seniority if he can seem older than he is, so he always puts on this awful jocular voice and tries to talk to our managing director about golf.

Axios In-House Newsletters Lights On from our revenue team . . . Cranes from Axios Local . . . Click Clack from our web-traffic guru . . . The Funnel from our head of growth . . . The TopLine from our sales warriors. • Those are just a few of the newsletters regularly published by Axios execs using Axios HQ—for their bosses, their teams and their colleagues across the company. Why it matters: This gives winners a forum for sharing best practices, encourages healthy competition among business units and gets rid of silos—everyone has visibility on what everyone’s up to. Between the lines: For the cofounders, these updates are an early-warning system for anyone’s activities that might be veering away from company goals. In one Sunday evening, we can be sure everyone’s on track and spot pockets that need our attention, encouragement or kudos. • And here’s our favorite part: When we have one-on-one meetings with our leaders, we’re already caught up. So we can use that time to talk through innovations, insights, bottlenecks, disruptions.

According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, only 15 percent of executives say their meetings with salespeople met their expectations. From that, only 7 percent of execs actually scheduled follow-up conversations. Ouch. That’s not good!

Alexa execs, like leaders elsewhere in Amazon, became frequent recipients of the CEO’s escalation emails, in which he forwarded a customer complaint accompanied by a single question mark and then expected a response within twenty-four hours.

Jessica Kim was one of them. A damn shame, she was one of those Asian worker-bee types. Always here past midnight. I heard she worked on Christmas. A real numbers whiz." "True, but she wasn't the best fit for client services. At her level, she needed to be a thinker, not a doer. I know this sounds crass, but her clothes never fit. They were a little too baggy for may taste." "Maybe you should have paid her more so she could hire a tailor." Laughter. "Wasn't she already being overpaid anyway, especially for a female associate?" My stomach lurched. I'd heard enough. My sadness vortexed into pure rage as I stomped over to them. "I gave blood, sweat, and tears for this company." I growled and pointed at Robert, my former group director. "You begged me to cover for you if your wife called when you were wining and dining that female client last year." Robert's face reddened. "But you didn't. I'm going through a divorce now." I went down the line to the next asshole. "Shaun, you tried to expense your escapade at a strip club by saying it was my birthday dinner and HR thought I was in on the scam. And Dan, you transposed all those numbers on the deal sheet and I caught them just before they were sent out, remember? You could have been fired for that, especially for showing up to work high. I went above and beyond for you. I saved your ass." Their jaws dropped. No, they weren't going to schmooze their way out of this one. "I know what you're thinking. How dare she say these things to us? She's just bitter because she was let go. Well, it's partly true. I'm bitter because I've wasted seven years of my life at this company that turned around and stabbed me in the back. If I wasn't leadership material, why didn't a female mentor coach me? Oh right, because there aren't any female execs here. But thank you, sincerely, for the wake-up-call. Now I can take my bonuses and severance and do something better with my time rather than covering for you and making you all richer.

These were typically Amazonian names: geeky, obscure, and endlessly debated inside AWS, since according to an early AWS exec, Bezos had once mused, “You know, the name is about 3 percent of what matters. But sometimes, 3 percent is the difference between winning and losing.

You’ve built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle,” Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. “You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?” (Amazon denied that Bezos said this.)

Finance execs know they should be figuring out new ways to work, but those who rose through the ranks one way, and endured a particular form of suffering and overwork, are reluctant to change their ways, no matter how much evidence is presented of the benefits of abandoning them.

Later, Alexa execs would say that Bezos’s close involvement made their lives more difficult but also produced immeasurable results. Jeff “gave us the license and permission to do some of the things we needed to do to go faster and to go bigger,” Toni Reid said. “You can regulate yourself quite easily or think about what you’re going to do with your existing resources…. Sometimes, you don’t know what the boundaries are. Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded.

In my mind, that factory worker now had a face, and his dormitory now had a mattress stuffed with all the cash foreign spies had been paying him in bribes to swap in their spiked encryption chip—the one with the weak crypto that cryptographers back at Fort Meade, or Cheltenham, or Moscow, or Beijing, or Tel Aviv, could easily crack. Or maybe it was the factory worker’s supervisor? Or maybe the C-level execs? Or maybe the CEO himself? Or maybe that factory worker wasn’t bribed, but blackmailed? Or maybe he was a CIA line officer all along?

Show me an incumbent bigco failing to adapt to change, I’ll show you top execs paid huge cash compensation for quarterly and annual goals.” “Every billionaire suffers from the same problem. Nobody around them ever says, ‘Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid.’” “‘Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.’—Peter Lynch

later published a trove of these documents, which revealed Amazon execs strategizing back in 2009 to run the company’s diapers business at a loss to combat the company that operated Diapers.com, and to buy the internet doorbell company Ring in 2018—not for its technology, but to gain a dominant position in the market.

The role of executive officer (XO) is unique. He can often be the loneliest person on the ship. If something happens to the captain, the “exec” needs to be trained, prepared, and ready to take over. The XO is also the chief morale officer, executor of the captain’s orders, head of discipline, and the meanest “badass” on the ship (when required). The captain has total control and the final say, but the XO must make it all happen and pull everything together the way the captain wants it done while at the same time making the crew do it right. The best XOs eventually become captains. The bad XOs reveal themselves quickly and the navy has a chance to pull them out of line before they become captains and make mistakes that could be fatal to the ship or crew. (Little has changed since 1848.)

can’t explain it. Just as I never learned their true reasons for selling Nest, I never heard an explanation for why they decided to keep it. Maybe the fact that Amazon was interested made Larry realize that Nest was a valuable asset after all. Maybe it was all an elaborate game of chicken to get me to toe the line and cut costs. Maybe they never had a real plan to begin with and this all happened because of some exec’s casual whim. You’d be surprised how often that’s the reason behind major changes.

The neurodivergent brain is like an exec without an assistant.

A good product manager will do a little of everything and a great deal of all this: Spec out what the product should do and the road map for where it will go over time. Determine and maintain the messaging matrix. Work with engineering to get the product built according to spec. Work with design to make it intuitive and attractive to the target customer. Work with marketing to help them understand the technical nuances in order to develop effective creative to communicate the messaging. Present the product to management and get feedback from the execs. Work with sales and finance to make sure this product has a market and can eventually make money. Work with customer support to write necessary instructions, help manage problems, and take in customer requests and complaints. Work with PR to address public perceptions, write the mock press release, and often act as a spokesperson.

I had to be close to the day-to-day design and engineering work but also manage the expectations of the executives but also work with sales and marketing to make sure not to repeat the mistakes of Philips but also go to Taiwan to check on manufacturing but also make sure my team was dealing with the stress but also debate with Steve and other execs daily but also occasionally attempt to sleep.

Some of Trump’s most powerful confidants, or as I call them, wingmen, made even more than the execs. Hannity cleared $30 million a year from Fox—on top of the money he made for his daily radio show. Bret Baier made $12 million a year. Laura Ingraham, who hasn’t been there as long,

What works: Stories about undocumented immigrants killing Americans Stories about citizens standing up to the government bureaucracy Stories about college students disrespecting the flag Stories about hate crime hoaxes Stories about liberal media outlets suppressing the truth And, whenever possible, stories involving attractive women (They could be the hero or the villain, it didn’t matter, but they had to be attractive.) “Job one is to titillate the audience,” the former producer said. “For celebrity stories, I had to pick the sexiest photos. And then I’d still hear, ‘Can you find hotter photos of her?’ Sigh. Okay, we’ll spend another thousand bucks on three photos from Getty.” It got to the point where the producer knew, without being told, which specific photos of Angelina Jolie the execs would expect to see. This sexualized approach spilled over to other parts of the show. If it was a quiet news day and the producers needed to fill a spare block, “we would look and see, what are the locals doing?” Fox tapped into its network of stations in big cities all across the country. “Then we would Google around to find the hottest reporter.” Workers striking in Detroit or rush hour flooding in Houston? Sometimes that’s how the editorial call was made.

What I admired most about A Few Good Men was the originality Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner showed by not having my character and Tom’s get involved in anything romantic, or even unprofessional. There was an expectation at that time on the part of studios and audiences that if an attractive woman showed up on film, it was only a matter of time before you saw her in bed with the leading man, or at least half naked. But Rob and Aaron had the nerve to buck that convention: they thought this story was about something else, and they were right. Years later Aaron told a film school class: “The whole idea of the movie was that these young lawyers were in way over their heads and two Marines were on trial for their lives, so if Tom Cruise and Demi Moore take time out to roll in the hay, I just didn’t think we would like them as much for doing that.” Sorkin said he wrote to an exec who had been lobbying hard for a sex scene. “I’ll never forget what the executive wrote back, which was, ‘Well if Tom and Demi aren’t going to sleep together why is Demi a woman?’ and that completely stumped me.” I loved that my character didn’t rely on her sex appeal, which was certainly something I hadn’t encountered very often in my roles. They presented a woman who was valuable to her colleagues—and to the story itself—because of her competence.

[Dagmar] Krause's material, on the other hand, is the kind of lunar voyage that reminds one how fortunate we are that a few record execs smoked dope in the late 1960s; how else could this music have slipped through the cracks?

Nate recognized a similar condition in his friends who had moved to LA and fallen under the spell of the film industry. Down there everyone knew weekend box office grosses. In the Valley, everyone knew whether the latest IPO had met expectations. If you lived in LA, you couldn’t help but envy the studio execs and film stars when you glimpsed them behind tinted windows, gliding down Sunset Boulevard in their Range Rovers. If you lived in the Valley, the cool kids were the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who could sometimes be spotted piloting their humming Teslas into the gleaming, low-slung corporate campuses of Menlo Park, Milpitas, and Cupertino.

Up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go-go speed of grow at all costs. I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency,” says Scott Cook, the Intuit founder and an Amazon board member during that time. “Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance. “Frankly, I didn’t think he could do it.

Finally, one of the senior guys opposing the idea spoke up. “Steve,” he asked, “isn’t this all pointless? You’re not going to do this—the channel will hate it.” Cue, who didn’t know any better, turned to him immediately. “The channel?” he exclaimed. “We lost two billion dollars last year! Who gives a fuck about the channel?” Steve perked up. “You,” he said, pointing at the senior exec, “are wrong. And you,” he continued, looking at Cue, “are right.

Caitlin imagined that, when it was first built, Tranquillitatis was conceived as a triumph of man over the forces of space, or at the very least a testament to the industry that would revolutionize life on the Moon and Earth. Signs to that effect hung all over the Hive, aging, covered in lunar dust and crud from the surface. They trumpeted the same slogans, promising a brilliant future: “Tomorrow Begins Today!” “Tranquillitatis: Where the Future Happens!” Or, her personal favorite, “Mine Your Future Today!” That one was hung right over one of the airlocks that led out to the surface. She was sure that the execs at the Guanghang Mining Company had visions of workers slapping it one by one as they walked out, like football players ready to take the field. If that had ever happened, it was well before she got there. Now if anyone acknowledged the sign, they just rolled their eyes. Besides, no one walked out of the airlocks anymore. The mining fields were much farther out, so everyone rode harvesters. Caitlin

The other major oil industry suppliers were similarly weary, trying to shore up earnings by slashing jobs, trimming project costs, and squeezing their own customers and suppliers wherever they could. (The wildcatters had it worse: many of the mom-and-pop operators of the American oil patch started to file for bankruptcy.) One year later, GE would merge its oil and gas unit into the oil-field giant Baker Hughes, keeping for itself a more than 50 percent stake in the company and spinning out a new public company to be run by Simonelli, under GE’s control. The transaction eased GE’s exposure to the ongoing oil rout and gave the new company, dubbed “Baker Hughes, a GE company,” vast new areas of redundant employees and operations to eliminate. With Baker Hughes, GE changed its tone a bit. The deal was transformational, but in which intended direction wasn’t made clear. GE execs like Bornstein would proclaim that the deal gave them “optionality,” but the reality was that investors were left in the dark on the strategy: Was GE doubling down on oil? Or was it preparing to exit the industry? The idea of holding such a long-term option was nice, but the game pieces in the positioning were people, and those who didn’t leave their job had no idea where the future of the company might be. The new arrangement didn’t spare Lufkin. The historic foundry was closed. The city’s annual financial report now just shows a blank line when listing the company’s employment tally, evidence of the more than four thousand jobs that evaporated after GE came to town. Between two Mondays—the day GE announced it was coming to Lufkin and the day the company said it would move on, leaving a shuttered foundry at the center of town—just 868 days had passed.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

Nothing I’ve ever done is as brutal as what corporate execs do all the time,” Lucas said. “I’ve never fired anybody. Never taken a perfectly innocent hardworking guy and screwed up his life and his family and his kids and his dog, because somebody needed to put an extra penny on the fuckin’ dividend.” “Communist,” she said. •

You’ve built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle,” Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. “You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?

If you were a venture capitalist, this just did not make sense anymore,” said another executive privy to the decision-making. But Bezos wanted to forge ahead. “Jeff is master of ‘this isn’t working today, but could work tomorrow.’ If customers like it, he’s got the cash flow to fund it,” this exec said. In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion). The tax-savvy CEO likely understood that these significant R&D expenses for projects like the Go store and Alexa were not only helping to secure Amazon’s future but could generate tax credits or be written off, lowering Amazon’s overall tax bill.

Show me an incumbent bigco failing to adapt to change, I’ll show you top execs paid huge cash compensation for quarterly and annual goals.