Novell Finally Kicks Jaffe Out
Last week Novell announced that they are finally getting rid of their CTO, Jeff Jaffe. It’s buried in the press release, but if you look hard enough you’ll find it.
It’s really too bad, because this press release really did not do much in the way of raising Novell’s stock price. It must be because the news of Jaffe’s departure is buried. If Novell had made a press release just about that, stock would surely have gone up.
As far as Novell goes, things can only get better. I heard people were literally cheering in the hallways when they heard the news. No, I’m not making that up.
Understand, I don’t have anything against Jaffe personally, so this isn’t meant as a personal attack. I really don’t want to get too critical of people, generally. But the fact that Jeff Jaffe was a CXO-level professional says a lot about what is wrong with corporate America in general, and Novell in particular. He was very well compensated because he was expected to lead the company, but instead people at Novell wonder what he even got paid anything for at all. If you had worked at Novell, you would know what I mean.
In a technical company like Novell, the CTO, if you have one, is expected to provide the technical leadership. What products should we be focusing on? What company strengths are we going to leverage? Who is our target market and our customer? What is our go-to-market strategy? What is our partnering and third-party-developer strategy? You’d expect a CTO to be intimately aware of all this stuff, and providing clear, consistent, and frequent direction to his engineering core to help bring about a technical vision that will win in the market place.
Jaffe’s strategy, on the other hand, was to completely disappear.
In fact, the only time I can ever remember him saying anything at all was just after he’d held a two-week-long brainstorming session with a bunch of his distinguished engineers. I knew they were doing it, because it was going on in a conference room on my floor at Novell, right by the bathrooms and the elevators.
Presumably, the purpose of this session was to get the Novell brain trust together and answer questions like these to come up with a competitive strategy. Of course, I wasn’t in the meetings, but the accounts I heard were a bit different from what I’d expected. Apparently Jaffe went into the meetings with an idea of what the strategy was. The first week was spent with the distinguished engineers trying to help him see that his strategy was not going to work. Towards the end of that week they collectively gave up, and spent the second week trying to figure out how to not make his strategy sound so ridiculous.
A few days after the meetings, he announced his strategy in a company-wide conference call. Basically the strategy was this:
- The open source community is full of people who like to develop software and give it away for free. They just like to work on interesting projects.
- We like to make money on software and we have lots of great ideas.
- Thus, perfect synergy. We will give the open source community ideas of software to create that will make us money. Since they have nothing better to do, the open source community will gladly make this software for us. Then our engineers will add a few key features, tie pretty bows around it, and sell it.
This same day I received an offer to work for Mozy. It was pretty clear that Jaffe’s strategy was a joke. Embarrassing, even. I remember thinking, “Things are never going to change around here if this is the best strategy our CTO can come up with.”
I was pretty discouraged about it. It is hard to work for management that doesn’t instill confidence. It is really surprising to me that a person could make the kind of salary he made with the kind of title he had and still do such a lousy job of leading. How in the world did he ever get the job in the first place?
After the call, I walked to the office of a teammate to vent about it. I told him, “I know in the past I’ve joked about some of the decisions different people in our upper management team have made, and I’ve quipped, ‘I could do their job better than that!’ Of course, we both know that I was kidding. But this time, I’m completely serious when I say this: I could do the CTO job better than Jeff Jaffe. I know I could.”
My friend said, “Yes, I know.”
When I was at Novell, this happened fairly often. Employees regularly felt very discouraged, disheartened, and demotivated because of executive management. I figured that was pretty much just the way companies worked, and that it happened like that everywhere.
Which is why I marveled at this fact, when Jaffe left. I contemplated how I’d felt that way, and realized that I’ve never once felt that way about my management chain at Microsoft. On the contrary, I find that I am continually amazed at the level of professionalism, attention to detail, quality of decision-making, and overall caring about the company that I find in my management chain.
I thought perhaps it’s just because I’m new, so I mentioned this to a guy on my team who’s been with Microsoft for over ten years. He said, “Pretty much, that is how I’ve always felt about my management chain too.”
Novell breaks my heart. I wanted so badly for Novell to succeed while I was there, and I still want good things for Novell. I know many great people who work there. Novell’s problem has never been in the individual contributors; it’s been with the company leadership.
So getting rid of Jaffe can only be a step forward. It may be too little, too late, but it’s worth a try.
