Why Silicon Valley Lacks True GMs?

I made the comment in an earlier post that Yahoo now needs true GMs, not just glorified functional managers. As I wrote that piece, it made me reflect on the significance of what I just said. Silicon Valley is not a place that has that many true General Managers. In the sense that GE or 3M grooms GMs, the valley simply doesn’t. The structures of the companies are such that there are hardly any GM jobs.

With one exception. The valley, because of its history and culture, has numerous people who have been startup CEOs, and whether or not they were good at it, have had the experience of the full-scale General Manager function. While these entrepreneurial managers may have come up the ranks of engineering or product marketing, at some point, many of them have had to raise money, manage sales, do biz dev deals, and manage finance.

Few of these people, however, end up wanting to go to large companies to become GMs. Why? They lack one essential skill, and they are afraid of one important unknown. The skill they lack is political experience to navigate a large matrix organization. The fear they have is of not having control over their deliverables, since there are too many pieces that they don’t control.

The internal folks, who have stayed for a long time inside the company, often have learned too much of the political skills, and are really good at excuses and finger pointing. Result? Nothing gets done. Brownian motion rules. Yahoo is the best example of this phenomenon these days.

The entrepreneurial GMs, the getting things done types, are risky hires, because they don’t have proven track-records in navigating the large company environment. You could try to convince them to come in as functional VPs, and get oriented in the environment, but that often doesn’t fit into the career timelines of the segment. They are traditionally not known for their patience.

So now that the valley is maturing, and large technology companies need true GMs, where are these GMs going to come from?