Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Playbook. The first one that talks to mind that I want to address a little bit more specifically is this idea of a cultural shift. Because we’ve mentioned it many times on the episode. Oh, with the DOJ there was a cultural shift. Oh, with the new leadership there was a culture shift. But what does that actually mean and how do you go about quantifying that? The thing that I kept hearing in all the research interviews we were doing was that when the stock price was flat and flat for a long time, people became convinced it’s just going to stay flat. Basically, whatever the cause of that was, it created a zero sum environment. Nothing I do is going to make the company more valuable. Therefore my value, the only way to grow value accruing to me is to win at the expense of someone else at this company. I’m going to get promoted over them, my product’s going to eat their product, my team’s going to eat their team. I get kudos and at the expense of them looking like an idiot. That’s the incentive. This is the cartoon org chart of all divisions of Microsoft pointing guns at one another?…

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