Wall Street and its analysts are only concerned with the stock price, not the health of the company. They assume that if the stock price is rising the company is successful, and the two are not that closely linked anymore. In the days of long term investing that view had some value, but in the casino that Wall Street has become, perception is more important than reality.

Under the Pepsi guy Apple became a product of marketing, not technology.

Isn’t that the truth! And haven’t we all worked for such managers, and watched the business suffer as a result. One of the best managers I ever worked for was a former IT professional who insisted on keeping his hand in on at least one byte-pushing part of the job at any given time. He was good at that, too, and it gave him amazingly sound perspective on the development process.

“He tried to sell computers like softdrinks.”

Well, why not… in the old days, Apple was a lot like Pepsi: much sugar, much fizz, and no nutritional value. <grin_duck_run />

In between they look at the problem and try to discover the reason and fix it.

In the US they fire workers, increase executive compensation and continue to function in the same fashion with a reduced capacity.

The justification is that you have to have high salaries to attract quality people, except the result really is, paying incompetent people high salaries.

The most destructive myth in US business is that managers don’t have to understand the business they manage. Looking at what happened to Apple when they hire an executive from Pepsi to run the corporation. He tried to sell computers like softdrinks. You have to understand your market, not the stock market to have a successful company. That fact is lost on CEOs and boards of directors.

Its amazing how many executives don’t do their jobs, and still get multi-million salaries. This doesn’t seem to freak too many people out. However, if your diversity department starts to encourage you to look harder for diverse candidates, its an outrage.