Comment by phkahler

They were all very successful at doing that. The financialization of everything was the death of all these businesses.

So true. A friend of mine worked as a manager at an ECO diary producer (milk, cheese yoghurt). An investment firm bought the owners who build the company from nothing for a substantial sum. They then brought in a new young executive team who mainly had experience and making online clothes and food retail startups. Initially the owners had a requirement to consult to the business for some amount of time. That was quickly dropped as they didn't want the old owners to "interfere" (essentially telling the exec that they what they wanted to do didn't work). After less than a year my friend and the product manager where the only managers left from before and they had become the "nay sayers" (I.e. telling the boars their ideas and execution don't work in this industry) and where eventually let go. By this time they had lost major costumers, majorly invested into equipment that still didn't work (as the product manager predicted from the get go) and the company was probably worth less than half. I just read the news that 7 years later they sold at 2% of the purchase price. Cases like this should really be mandatory study.

> private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground

Absolutely, but (and this depends upon the "financialization of everything" point someone made above) that doesn't matter, because in the meantime they'll have personally made a profit on the deal. Building (or keeping) a sustainable business was never one of their goals. I call it "extractive capitalism", and it's ruining the world.

the old "it's all the same shit" fallacy that i loathe so dearly

Drucker would argue you need practice (e.g. actually doing the work) rather than an educational background to be a good manager.[0] So I would argue he didn't have the experience to be a manager at that level.

https://mlari.ciam.edu/peter-drucker-s-vision-of-management-...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but IIRC Gerstner's time at IBM was 100% financialization. He didn't solve any of IBM's core problems. Outside of the momentary bright spot of "Global Services" the largest impact he had was selling off IBM's immense real-estate (and other) capital they had acquired by being a capex business for a 100 years, and converted that all to a decade long free rent/etc 0 opex business, Along with EOL'ing their pension program, and a lot of other 'quality of life' stuff that made them one of the best companies to work for. It made the numbers look great as he "reduced overhead" in the short term, bur just created further long term problems. If IBM could have caught just a single one of the tech waves of the next 25 years they would have done fine, but for some reason they continue to snatch defeat despite seemingly always being in the right place at the right time. But it seems they always overcharge, over engineer, whatever their solutions and the market rejects them. (ex, flash arrays, POWER as an alternate hyperscaler server arch, watson/ML, failing to capitalize on centos, etc, etc, etc) while dumping spinning disk, fabs, etc at roughly the right time.