How the Mighty Fall
Discusses signs pointing toward the decline of a business, how far the decline can proceed before failure becomes inevitable, and crucial steps companies can take to reverse course.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
13mentions
9people
2009–2025years
69% recommend31% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Good riddance. 7 years too late. I worked as a Google Cloud consultant for a major part of my career. We had this really large client, we were bleeding money because one of our ex-employees promised the client a cost reduction strategy that was impossible and I took over his role - literally a hot seat. We walked into Google's office, it was fantastic, they had something like 12 cuisines in the dining area, multiple game rooms with Table tennis and all. Sleeping rooms, you name it. It was more of a 5 star luxury resort experience than anything.
We walk into the meeting room, past the employee desks, over 50% of it was empty. I asked one of the colleagues showing us around where they all were - "they just work when they like!". Wow, what a dream! Google has/had? this rule where you can take some 20% of your time in a given day for yourself. But, mostly people used something like 40% of it in reality. I thought this was the perfect working culture with great work-life balance. I had very high expectations for the employee quality until I met the TLM and his team we were supposed to meet.
What a bunch of clowns. They suggested we use Cloud Spanner - one of the most expensive offerings at the time and our bottleneck (and bleeding) came from legacy MySql. He didn't even know that Spanner was more expensive than their Cloud SQL offerings, not to mention completely different offerings (it's No-SQL). None of them even knew when to use Spanner for and when to stick with SQL for. It was their own product line-up and we had more knowledge than them! I didn't pass any GCP exams even, at the time. That was the funniest part. We just needed help with some re-architecting of the client's application on a legacy PHP-MySQL combo. They didn't even have suggestions on what stack to migrate to! No idea whatsoever and they tried to talk their way out of it. In the middle of the meeting, my boss leaned over to me and told me "Neya, I think you probably know more than these guys, let's leave" and we wasted no time. To Google's credit, they did offer us some credits to use, but it was far too less than what were bleeding.
I went back to office and out of curiosity searched for how much these guys make - It was easily 120k - 250k (back then) depending on their experience. That's when I literally stopped trusting Google with anything at all. I could never be that laxed when I take that much money from anyone. Later, I learned a lot of these people were just there because depending on the country, you had to maintain a quota (ratio) of certain demographics within Google, most of the TLMs and their teams just conveniently fit into that. Why fix something that's not broke, right?
The Google we knew with the original startup culture was long dead and this story is atleast 7 years old now. For over 5 years since then, they did nothing but make money by simply increasing prices for GCP offerings. I remember our costs rising up suddenly after they just pulled the rug on us with Cloud storage price increase at random. No innovation, nothing. The AI mode they launched now after ChatGPT took the market by storm was what should've been 5 years ago. They are following the pattern exactly as described in the book we learned in our Masters' - "How the mighty fall" (really good book) and well deserved. You reap what you sow.
/endrant (thanks for reading!)
- Take a look at Jim Collins’ How the Mighty Fall. https://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/09...
- How the Mighty Fall [1] is the book by Jim Collins that I'll never forget.
The lessons within remain top of mind as a key mental check that has stuck with me over the years. The book begins with a study on hubris and how your blindspots are like a cancer of mind that remain undetected while working to kill you long before their effects are known.
See Jim Collins' 2009 interview w/ Charlie Rose to get the gist and understand the context for how the book came to be: https://charlierose.com/videos/22502 [video]
[1] https://www.jimcollins.com/books/how-the-mighty-fall.html
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, by Jim Collins https://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/09...
- Interesting thoughts. It could be that PayPal has over extended certain models for far longer than they should have. Some forms of tech debt should be resolved sooner, rather than later. It would be fascinating to know the real reasons behind the fall from grace.
Is it really the employees, or the managers? There could be dilapidated business processes still in place that even prevent the company from healing itself. An interesting take on this is the book How The Mighty Fall.
Some relevant things to know might be if they have restructured a lot, and what their churn has looked like both in the executive suite and in engineering.
- That was the question posed by Jim Collins when he spoke at West Point to a group of 36 people-- 12 U.S. Army generals, 12 "Fortune" 500 CEO types and 12 leaders from the social sectors.
Specifically, he asked them, "Where’s America? Is America at an inflection point? And if so, which way? Because great nations -- Athens, 500 BCE, Rome, Egyptian Old Kingdom, Egyptian New Kingdom, Minoans of Crete have fallen."
This question was the inspiration for his fascinating book, "How the Mighty Fall" -- you can watch his interview with Charlie Rose on this here: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10565
He said his research team found 5 stages of decline that were common among all the great enterprises that fell. He said the first stage is hubris, but you can go through the first 4 stages and still recover before reaching the fifth and final stage, which is capitulation or death.
- Or read the book by the same author that covers that exact question, _How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In_
