Yep, it took me a while to understand the saying “a fish rots from its head”. I’ve seen it happen a bunch, where the upper management changes hands, or the ownership changes. It might take a little while, but if the new leadership is bad, then it certainly will flow downhill. The place I’m at is pretty good, and the founders are still on the board still, after decades. Wonder what will happen once they move on. Hopefully, the culture will still be so ingrained that it takes a longer amount of time to come apart.
Regarding this company’s founder, I don’t understand why she isn’t in jail already for all those lies she told, to investors, to the public, to the US military, to the healthcare field, patients. She should be at least facing a whole bunch of charges. Her being listed with a net worth of US$0 isn’t enough.
As I understand it, there were (and are) parts of this technology that were promising, but this Balwani guy wasn’t content with a medical device company that could have been neatly packaged up and sold to Medtronic or someone a few years out for a few hundred million bucks, but instead appealed to Holmes’ vanity that it could be all things to all people and decided to try to make it worth $10s of billions by making shit up.
I actually believe that much of the “crazy eyes” appearance is due to the lighting reflecting off of the irises of her eyes, creating little white rings. But of course these are publicity photos and so they CHOSE to keep those photos, rather than ones that do not suffer from that artifact.
And “building a religion.” That is well past time to update your resume and now time to run screaming from the building. Unemployment is better than further association with an organization like that.
“With time, some employees grew less afraid of him and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span.”
Hey, this Balwani guy sounds positively presidential.
Not knowing any specifics about Holmes I am wondering… did she manage to survive for so long because she didn’t appear particularly greedy or materialistic?
Other twenty somethings would probably have been found out by the third Lamborghini, but my understanding is that her lifestyle was modest by Silicon Valley standards. The investors might have misread this as genuine competence.
I don’t think so… Circular reflections in the eyes are pretty common in portrait lighting (especially with ring-lights) and viewers are fairly used to seeing it.
The (potentially dubious) physiological explanation would be that we’re not used to seeing whites of the eyes above the pupil except when someone is very upset or frightened…
Of course some people read that as “very interested” rather than upset or frightened. (love the .gif BTW.)
And you want somebody who is driven in this sort of role. But somebody who is driven to solve problems rather than ignore them. Of course when she said “founding a religion” she meant suspending all reason and simply believing.
Yeah, I’ll bet she’s very compelling in person. One of those people who could draw you in and make you feel special and listened to… I’ve know people with this look in their eyes, one of whom is in some kind of weird Christian cult last I heard…
And this is why we need to start requiring mandatory personality disorder testing for all executive positions: Cluster B disorders (narcissistic, borderline, antisocial, histrionic) or people with a lot of the check-box traits but not quite enough of those traits to be officially diagnosed should never be in a management position under any circumstances. Or, you know, people who aren’t at least able to compensate enough in order to fool the tests, because that ability implies enough self-awareness to at least work around the worst aspects of the disorder.
Narcissists are probably the worst, because it itself is a disease of self-awareness in a lot of ways: they are the least likely to be able to determine when failure is their fault, misplace blame, usually firing a bunch of people in the process, which compounds the problem, and then a blame/fire/blame/fire downward spiral usually occurs, leading inevitably to some kind of terrible outcome.
Ah yes, The Alchemist. I read it years ago because of all the good press it got, and hated it. Its message of “it will happen if you really want it” fits quite well with the story of Theranos.
Unfortunately, as we all know reality has this habit of hitting like a locomotive and not really caring about your dreams.
Anyone who didn’t leave at this point… had a job. It’s obvious in retrospect that the head grifters are not good people. It’s also obvious in retrospect that they were grifters, and not merely psychotic-yet-essentially-legitimate tyrants of the sort that our business culture venerates. (Elon Musk is the poster boy for this at the moment, assuming he stays legitimate.)
But don’t be too quick to judge people who choose to stay in situations that look like they’re headed for a train wreck, when the alternative is to jump off a speeding train. Unplanned exits from jobs are like torpedo hits to most people’s well-being: they might not sink you, but they’re big trouble all the same. Is there another job for your particular skill set within driving distance of your house? Maybe… eventually… or maybe not. How do your children and spouse feel about a move? How many extra months will you need to work past your original retirement date if you’re out of work for six months now? (Hint: a lot more than six.) And so forth.
It’s sad, but the nature of work under late-stage capitalism is that there just aren’t a lot of bright lines for things like this.
I forget what hotel chain it is that has square, backlit mirrors in the bathroom, but the cool glowing-iris effect it creates is so compelling that I can gaze reverently at my own ugly mug for hours.
