Interesting read — I must admit that today’s CEOs of large companies are not like the CEOs of my grandfather’s generation who were more like the mold of Sam Walton.
This habit for grandiose predictions seems to be contagious. Last fall, Miguel McKelvey, founder of shared office space giant We Work Cos. promised his company would be in a thousand locations “in the near future.” Given that the company at the time was present in just 52 places, this promised a growth rate north of 1500 percent—but probably had some intended influence on the company’s $10 billion valuation.
In 2013, before he left Blackberry under pressure, the company’s CEO Thorsten Heins declared that “in 5 years, I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore.”
Six years earlier Steve Ballmer of Microsoft assured the world, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
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