alt Hacker News>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful.
Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing).
It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that VP was replaced, and to show off their bold new direction, the new VP cancels almost everything novel the previous person started. Or you can reach out just at the moment the new guy or gal comes in, right when they're looking for the pieces of their bold new direction, and you become part of that.
I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. Alas. At least I have been fortunate enough to experience both directions in quantities that roughly balance out.
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Having been on both sides of this: Often, one of the purposes of the leadership change was to start shedding the old regime's pet projects. Even semi-successful pet projects can be a distraction from the direction the company wants to go.
I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.
My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time. If the CEO and board want the company working on some things and not others, you're on thin ice if your manager is assigning you to go against the company's direction. It's scarier when you may not even know what they're doing to you.
For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal
"Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own." --Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock
Once you look, you see this all the time when new CEOs join large companies, they feel the need to mark their territory by taking a dump on it.
> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy.
My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion.
At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.