Typical case for botched leadership transition.<p>Arora held executive positions at Google, Deutsche Telecom, and in a fund mgmt group, is the poster boy of a leader Softbank could wish for. Don't think he would have come over without a clearly defined date for taking over the helm.<p>Interesting to see which self-respecting exec would be willing to follow into Arora's footsteps. I guess we see a B-player puppet so Masayoshi can continue to hold on.
I have a different takeaway - Leaders from Google like Nikesh Arora, Marissa Mayer, Vic Gundotra don't succeed outside of Google because Google has a very unique culture and team environment, and success does not come from individual leaders at Google - it comes from teams.
Interesting. He seemed uniquely suited to do the job, with a commercial background in both old telecom and new cloud. Perhaps this just didn't translate to picking companies to buy.
On Twitter, Nikesh is spinning it as a positive, no big deal. He says: I still love Masa, etc. So maybe it worked out well for him. Softbanks stock has declined somewhat since he is reported to have bought $487 million worth to become Softbanks 2nd largest shareholder. If he managed to unwind that transaction and somehow break even then he has done very well. That would mean he would have essentially freerolled any upside in the company's share price over the last 2 years, if it had rised. Pretty interesting because on the face of it, it would look like Softbank had him over a barrel.