Management Tenure

How long has management been...managing? That's what this one's about.

Unlike academia, business managers don't have you-can't-be-fired-for-any-reason tenure. The presumption for most of the investment community is that long tenure is good, and short tenure is bad.

Why? Because, presumably, when an Ahab-like manager has been around "forever," they will have seen all the good times and all the bad times in the industry. They will have deep pattern recognition and know how to navigate through crises. That's the presumption, anyway, and it was sort of a hysterical tussle with brilliant young people who wanted to manage and be left alone when the Woodstock Era of the internet happened in 1994. There simply was no seasoned or long-tenured management. So investors and boards had to hire smart young people and pray that they were...good.

And, for the most part, the young smart ones smoked the old experienced ones who knew how to manage well...in 1984. (Think about the demise of Microsoft in this era as a good example of a world where long management tenure doesn't exactly translate into "good.")

Hi, Bill. Hi, Steve. Just keepin' it real.

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Finance: What are CEOs, CFOs, and COOs?41 Views

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Finance a la shmoop... what are CEOs, CFOs and COOs lots of C's you know sort of

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like most of our high school report cards but it's a different story [Girl given a school report card with list of C grades]

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all right so the C here for all of these stands for chief not the C in

00:20

big cheese and the O here for all of these stands for officer...

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But sort of in that vein cop ish like when you are one of these

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officers it's your watch your beat your patrol and all that the delimiter here

00:40

is the middle letter so let's start at the top there E the E in CEO stands for

00:47

executive and distinctively the CEO is hired by the board of directors who in

00:53

turn is elected by the common shareholders the CEO is in charge of and [Woman CEO standing in her office]

01:00

well pretty much everything basically executing on the mandate which is to

01:04

make money over the long term for shareholders the CEO deals with both

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internal operational and financial issues as well as dealing directly with

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shareholders externally you know on the outside people ie those Wall Street folk [People working in Wall Street]

01:19

and she is generally you know where the buck stop...okay

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moving on and that'll make some nice venison....Okay the CFO is

01:30

hired by the CEO and while on bad days the F might stand for something else

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on a normal day the F stands for financial, the chief financial officer

01:42

deals with the dollar numbers the bean-counting [CFO counting beans]

01:45

from hiring and paying people usually via the head of human resources hired by

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the CFO to tracking profitability of divisions which the CFO usually does in

01:55

concert with others in the company to you know dealing with Wall Street people [CFO holding a chicken wing]

01:59

as the wing man to the CEO at rubber chicken lunches

02:05

well if the company is

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gonna raise debt to go buy a competitor or sell equity from insiders in a

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secondary offering or use stock to acquire a tools company which will let

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it operate more efficiently well all of that goes through the CFOs highly [A cluttered desk of beans]

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cluttered desk all right so moving on then there's the COO and if you say

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it all together it sounds like a bird but it's not the middle O there stands

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for operating well other than in a company which just does surgery all day [a heart monitor in a surgery room]

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the operating officer doesn't actually do surgery rather she operates the

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company and usually that involves asking a thousand questions hopefully not all

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at once like that Fed Ex guy who had too much caffeine are we getting the best

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prices on the raw plastic we're ordering from war-torn New Zealand, are we making

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enough selfie helmets, and is your dad still disappointed with you for getting

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a C in accounting 101 back in high school

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mm-hmm? just keeping it real there pal... well we can't answer the first two

03:09

and as for the last one well you're a COO oh you can probably afford a nice

03:14

shrink now so go work out your issues [COO laying on sofa talking with psychiatrist]

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