Bowing to the boss
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake: President Trump is emasculating the leadership of America’s technology companies, meddling so deeply in their strategic management and sales generation efforts that they might as well be taking detailed instructions from the White House. Trump is bending trade laws to suit his freewheeling ways, acts unmatched by any of his predecessors as president. The technology industry must find ways to curb this intrusion.
Donald Trump is president of the United States, a noteworthy achievement. In the political world. The presidency does not confer entrepreneurial experience or sagacity, however. By slapping tariffs on trading partners, and threatening to jack up interest on their operations or – in the case of Intel Corp. asking its CEO to resign – Trump is rewriting the duties and curbing the powers of technology companies’ OEMs or chief decision makers, transmitting the view that they are lining up for instructions at the White House.
The American president does not have Jensen Huang’s business pedigree. His entrepreneurial history rests on a far lower rung of the business ladder compared with the experiences of Huang, CEO of Nvidia, Lisa Su (CEO at AMD), and Lip-Bu Tan, (CEO of Intel Corp. Yet, Mr. Trump has inserted himself with reckless naivety into how these companies are managed. His actions do not bode well for the companies he has wrestled power from and, by extension, the rest of the technology world.