Quand l’équipe de vente mène l’entreprise

La biographie de Steve Jobs sorti cette semaine regorge de passages délectables et empreints de la délicatesse légendaire de Jobs. Un de ces passages particulièrement marquants est à propos du déclin de plusieurs entreprises et du lien entre ce déclin et les vendeurs dans l’organisation.

Désolé pour l’anglais, mais une traduction libre ne rendrait pas justice au passage…

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.

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