"most improved"
Now with 75% less chair throwing, one presumes. Or maybe 75% more. With CEOs, who can tell ...
Jobs and career community website Glassdoor has named Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer its "most improved tech CEO" for 2012, though judging by the numbers it's a dubious honor, to say the least. According to the site's latest annual Tech Company Comparison Report, which it published on Tuesday, Microsoft's chief exec scored a CEO …
Not all of us are actually capable of learning from out mistakes. It appears that Ballmer can, and good on him for that. Good luck to him next year, and let's hope he rises up the charts a few more points. Better; let's hope he goes up the charts because he's actually gotten better and not because those above suddenly got worse.
Beer, because everyone deserves an attaboy carrot instead of the constant drumbeat of "stick, stick, stick."
Microsoft has markedly improved its monitoring of employees use of the web sites during office hours, paying particular attention to job sites, surveys and thumbs up and down clicks.
A Microsoft spokesperson was quoted as saying "we now try to provide our CEO with a detailed breakdown of who's clicking what, where and when. We took the lead from Facebook, although their system is still a fair bit more comprehensive than ours. Apparently they have a feedback circuit set up so that anyone who clicks a thumbs down, gets an electric shock."
It bases its company ratings on reviews posted by employees
IMHO, Tim Brown 1 came closest with his employee monitoring system. All you need to add is the technology the US used for the election.
And voilà, finally an explanation why Microsoft became fascinated with touch screens.. :)
The key problem is a system called Stack Ranking that Ballmer has championed, and thus it won't go away til he does.
It's an HR performance system. It basically looks at every team in MS, and ranks every employee from best to worst. The worst are often fired, or at least cannot easily move within the company. The rankings are first based on manager review, and then on a moderating system where managers fight to represent their employees (or not).
So, two problems:
1) Generally it's all actually based on visibility rather than productivity, and can be gamed. HR/management actively promote the idea that how one does something (e.g. never saying how things could be better, always being very pro-Microsoft) is more important than what one does.
2) If you have a team of superstars, you'll still have to rank some of them badly (the stats for each team must fit a bell curve, which is far too small a sample size to be accurate) and those that weren't great (but weren't the worst) this time are the lot expecting to be the worst next time
This leads to massive politicking and zero morale. Ballmer's basically got an almost zero track record of success, as their few revenue sources are just continuations of decades-old product lines. Nothing recently has been any good, except Xbox (which still makes a massive loss) and Windows Phone (which still has gaping flaws and is very late). MS have had zero visionary leadership in 20 years, I think. Even Gates, with his prediction of tablet computing, just wasn't the guy to make it happen. Sad as it makes me to say it, Jobs was the guy.
Ballmer is the worst: he isn't visionary, has admitted he has no idea about share prices, and he just wastes the time and money generated by clever engineers at MS.
Ya, waiting in the long line at the Microsoft Store in Ottawa, Canada, wait, there is no MS store in Ottawa! Lol, we have multiple Apple stores. Or was I at Future Shop in line waiting to get a Surface, oh wait they didn't have them in store for launch. Exactly what aggressive product launches are they talking about??? If that is aggressive then an Apple launch must be hyper-super-duper-over-the-top-aggressive.
I would like to know the stats, iTunes versus (lol) Media Center. What percentage of users for both on Windows? I feel that single statistic is why Balmer should have been pushed off the top of MS a long, long, long time ago. Allowing Apple to scoop up users on their own platform, so different then the MS of yesteryear.