On March 15, 2005, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard voted on a motion that “the Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.” The motion passed, 218 to 185, with 18 abstentions. Summers remained president of the university.
A second motion was scheduled for February 28, 2006. On February 21, Summers announced his resignation. “I believe, therefore, that it is best for the University to have new leadership.”
In 1985 Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, tried to remove the chief executive John Sculley. Apple’s board backed Sculley. Jobs lost control of the Macintosh division in May. In September he left to found a new computer company, NeXT.
He later said: “It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.”
On October 7, 2003, California voters removed Governor Gray Davis from office. In the recall election, 55.4 percent voted yes. It was the first recall of a governor in California and the second in US history, after North Dakota recalled Lynn Frazier in 1921.
On July 24, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in a fireside chat about “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
Gallup calls the first months of a presidency “the honeymoon period.” It found that “all but Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter had higher approval ratings about 100 days after taking office” than at the start.
Earn your stripes. A newcomer proves himself or herself before others accept the authority.
Pay your dues. Do the hard work first. Rank comes later.
He’s lost the room. Said of a coach or a manager whose team no longer follows him. He still holds the title.
Lame duck. Merriam-Webster: “an elected official or group continuing to hold political office during the period between the election and the inauguration of a successor.”
On November 17, 2023, the board of OpenAI fired its CEO, Sam Altman. Microsoft quickly hired Altman and the co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new AI research team. On November 20, more than 700 of OpenAI’s roughly 770 employees signed a letter. They said they “may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary.”
The letter demanded that the board resign and reinstate Altman and Brockman. On November 20, the chief technology officer, Mira Murati, posted: “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” On November 21, OpenAI announced that Altman would return as CEO. Most of the board was replaced.
“HiPPO stands for ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.'” In American business, the term is used for the opinion of the most senior person in the room, when it decides a question that data should decide.
Ronny Kohavi wrote that “Dylan Lewis at Intuit came up with the acronym HiPO back in 2006.” The analytics writer Avinash Kaushik heard it and blogged about it in October 2006. Kohavi’s team at Microsoft added the second P and the image of a hippopotamus.
In the National Football League, Black Monday is the first Monday after the regular season ends. It is the day many head coaches are fired. An Associated Press headline of December 29, 1998, read: “NFL coaches face ‘Black Monday’ with five fired.”
Long service does not protect a coach. In 2024 the New England Patriots parted with Bill Belichick after 24 seasons.
In 1969 Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull published The Peter Principle. Its rule: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
The mechanism is that employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs. Each success earns the next, larger job, until a person reaches a job he can no longer do well.
Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days was published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003 as a guide for managers starting a new job. It advises them to pursue small-scale “early wins” to build credibility.