He has aided fallen financiers including AIG’s Hank Greenberg and Enron’s Andy Fastow.
.. But he is also an inveterate risk taker — a lover of the action in Las Vegas as well as at his firm Boies Schiller & Flexner — who goes the extra mile for clients. He did a favour for Mr Weinstein, and it is costing him in the court of public opinion.
Mr Boies signed a contract on July 11 hiring a business intelligence firm called Black Cube to spy on Mr Weinstein’s accusers, The New Yorker magazine reported. Run by former Israeli intelligence agents, its operatives used false identities to gain the trust of the people in the case and collect information about them. Its objectives included helping Mr Weinstein “stop the publication of a negative article in a leading NY newspaper”.
However, the mis-step by Mr Boies was hardly an isolated incident. After allegations emerged in 2015 that the blood tests designed by Silicon Valley laboratory Theranos were inaccurate, Mr Boies could be found sitting on the board of the company while his firm was providing it legal advice.
.. he would listen to his mother read and memorise the information. His powers of recall served him well.
.. His courtroom style is notoriously disarming. His attire — typically, a Lands’ End jacket and trousers — comes straight from the heartland. But his questions are hard. After he was done with Westmoreland, the general said he wished he had a lawyer like Mr Boies.
.. Mr Boies matched wits so successfully with Bill Gates that the software supremo was left shaken. “I’m the one with the good memory,” Mr Gates protested to Vanity Fair. “He’s the one trying to confuse people.”
.. Mr Olson. “He has overcome a reading disability. He processes information very, very quickly. He remembers things very well.”
.. He is a man known for conducting several telephone conversations at once. Even as he was responding to the Weinstein scandal, Mr Boies returned to the headlines in a controversial dispute involving American football.
How Google’s Quantum Computer Could Change the World
The ultra-powerful machine has the potential to disrupt everything from science and medicine to national security—assuming it works
A reliable, large-scale quantum computer could transform industries from AI to chemistry, accelerating machine learning and engineering new materials, chemicals and drugs.
.. “People ask, ‘Well, is it a thousand times faster? Is it a million times faster?’ It all depends on the application. It could do things in a minute that we don’t know how to do classically in the age of the universe. For other types of tests, a quantum computer probably helps you only modestly or, in some cases, not at all.”
.. Qubits, on the other hand, are like coins spinning through the air in a coin toss, showing both sides at once.
.. The computing power of a data center stretching several city blocks could theoretically be achieved by a quantum chip the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
.. Unlike classical computers, quantum computers don’t test all possible solutions to a problem. Instead, they use algorithms to cancel out paths leading to wrong answers, leaving only paths to the right answer—and those algorithms work only for certain problems. This makes quantum computers unsuited for everyday tasks like surfing the web
.. Quantum computers are also subject to high error rates, which has led some scientists and mathematicians to question their viability. Google and other companies say the solution is error-correction algorithms, but those algorithms require additional qubits to check the work of the qubits running computations. Some experts estimate that checking the work of a single qubit will require an additional 100.
.. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, put it this way: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
Feynman was one of the first to introduce the idea of a quantum computer. In a 1981 lecture
.. investment has surged, with projects under way at Google, Microsoft, IBM and Intel Corp
.. D-Wave .. the company’s $15 million 2000Q model is useful only for a narrow category of data analysis
.. Companies and governments are scrambling to prepare for what some call Y2Q, the year a large-scale, accurate quantum computer arrives, which some experts peg at roughly 2026
.. Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 showed that the NSA is building its own quantum computer as part of an $80 million research program called Penetrating Hard Targets
.. Experts believe their biggest near-term promise is to supercharge machine learning and AI, two rapidly growing fields—and businesses. Neven of Google says he expects all machine learning to be running on quantum computers within the decade.
.. In May, IBM unveiled a chip with 16 qubits
.. John Martinis, Google’s head of quantum hardware, in which he let slip that Google had a 22-qubit chip.
.. “If you were to vibrate this frame, you can actually see the temperature rise on the thermometer,
..
Google and its peers will likely sell quantum computing via the cloud, possibly charging by the second.
.. Neven’s team in Southern California is racing to finish the 49-qubit chip
With LinkedIn, Microsoft Looks to Avoid Past Acquisition Busts
“I absolutely think of LinkedIn as our Instagram,” Mr. Nadella said.
.. The company’s executives on Thursday will outline plans to integrate the professional identity people have on LinkedIn with Microsoft Outlook and the rest of the Office suite. LinkedIn members will be able to draft résumés in Word to update their LinkedIn profiles.
.. About 10,000 LinkedIn employees will join Microsoft.
Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
After running Microsoft for 25 years, Bill Gates handed the reins of CEO to Steve Ballmer in January 2000. Ballmer went on to run Microsoft for the next 14 years. If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. He tripled Microsoft’s sales to $78 billion and profits more than doubled from $9 billion to $22 billion. The launch of the Xbox and Kinect, and the acquisitions of Skype and Yammer happened on his shift. If the Microsoft board was managing for quarter to quarter or even year to year revenue growth, Ballmer was as good as it gets as a CEO. But if the purpose of the company is long-term survival, then one could make a much better argument that he was a failure as a CEO as he optimized short-term gains by squandering long-term opportunities.
How to Miss the Boat – Five Times
Despite Microsoft’s remarkable financial performance, as Microsoft CEO Ballmer failed to understand and execute on the five most important technology trends of the 21stcentury:
- in search – losing to Google;
- in smartphones – losing to Apple;
- in mobile operating systems – losing to Google/Apple;
- in media – losing to Apple/Netflix;
- and in the cloud – losing to Amazon.
Microsoft left the 20th century owning over 95% of the operating systems that ran on computers (almost all on desktops). Fifteen years and 2 billion smartphones shipped in the 21st century and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is 1%. These misses weren’t in some tangential markets – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading.
.. Execution and Organization of Core Businesses
It wasn’t that Microsoft didn’t have smart engineers working on search, media, mobile and cloud. They had lots of these projects. The problem was that Ballmer organized the company around execution of its current strengths – Windows and Office businesses. Projects not directly related to those activities never got serious management attention and/or resources.For Microsoft to have tackled the areas they missed – cloud, music, mobile, apps – would have required an organizational transformation to a services company. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. They are hard to do in a company that excels at products.
Ballmer and Microsoft failed because the CEO was a world-class executor (a Harvard grad and world-class salesman) of an existing business model trying to manage in a world of increasing change and disruption. Microsoft executed its 20th-century business model extremely well, but it missed the new and more important ones. The result? Great short-term gains but long-term prospects for Microsoft are far less compelling.
.. Visionary CEOs are product and business model centric and extremely customer focused.
The best are agile and know how to pivot – make a substantive change to the business model while or before their market has shifted. The very best of them shape markets – they know how to create new markets by seeing opportunities before anyone else.
.. Between 2001 to 2008, Jobs reinvented the company three times. Each transformation – from a new computer distribution channel – Apple Stores to disrupting the music business with iPod and iTunes in 2001; to the iPhone in 2007; and the App store in 2008 – drove revenues and profits to new heights.
.. They know who their customers are because they spend time talking to them. They use strategy committees and the exec staff for advice, but none of these CEOs pivot by committee.
.. One of the strengths of successful visionary and charismatic CEOs is that they build an executive staff of world-class operating executives (and they unconsciously force out any world-class innovators from their direct reports). The problem is in a company driven by a visionary CEO, there is only one visionary. This type of CEO surrounds himself with extremely competent executors, but not disruptive innovators
.. When visionary founders depart (death, firing, etc.), the operating executives who reported to them believe it’s their turn to run the company (often with the blessing of the ex CEO). At Microsoft, Bill Gates anointed Steve Ballmer, and at Apple Steve Jobs made it clear that Tim Cook was to be his successor.
Once in charge, one of the first things these operations/execution CEOs do is to get rid of the chaos and turbulence in the organization. Execution CEOs value stability, process and repeatable execution. On one hand that’s great for predictability, but it often starts a creative death spiral – creative people start to leave, and other executors (without the innovation talent of the old leader) are put into more senior roles – hiring more process people, which in turn forces out the remaining creative talent
.. As process oriented as the new CEOs are, you get the sense that one of the things they don’t love and aren’t driving are the products (go look at the Apple Watch announcements and see who demos the product).
.. The problem is that a supply chain CEO who lacks a passion for products and has yet to articulate a personal vision of where to Apple will go is ill equipped to make the right organizational, business model and product bets to bring those to market.
.. The dilemma facing the boards at Microsoft, Apple or any board of directors on the departure of an innovative CEO is strategic: Do we still want to be a innovative, risk taking company? Or should we now focus on execution of our core business, reduce our risky bets and maximize shareholder return.
Tactically, that question results in asking: Do you search for another innovator from outside, promote one of the executors or go deeper down the organization to find an innovator?
.. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (and 20th century’s other creative icon -Walt Disney) shared the same blind spot: They suggested execution executives as their successor
.. if the board decides that the company needs another innovator at the helm, you can almost guarantee that the best executor – the number 2 and/or 3 vice president in the company – will leave, feeling that they deserved the job. Now the board is faced with not only having lost its CEO, but potentially the best of the executive staff.
.. The irony is that in the 21st century, the tighter you hold on to your current product/markets, the likelier you will be disrupted
.. Increasingly, a hands-on product/customer, and business model-centric CEO with an entrepreneurial vision of the future may be the difference between market dominance and Chapter 11.
Summary:
- Innovation CEOs are almost always replaced by one of their execution VPs
- If they have inherited a powerful business model this often results in gains in revenue and profits that can continue for years
- However, as soon the market, business model, technology shifts, these execution CEOs are ill-equipped to deal with the change – the result is a company obsoleted by more agile innovators and left to live off momentum in its twilight years