Today I read the news about the proposed acquisition of Skype by Microsoft. As many of you already know, I am one of those people who have exorcized Microsoft from their digital lifestyle.

However, I use Skype for international call service on a daily basis and it appears that MS will once again be encroaching into my digital perimeter. I don't consider this a positive development.

But that is not what this post is about.

As I usually do when I am piqued by a news item, I start surfing through online images and a few things dawned on me about the characters at the head of the current four way tech "face off" between Apple, MS, Google and Facebook.

In particular, I want you to look at the faces of the people at the top of these four companies on the cover of Time Magazine. I chose the cover images because of all the thought and production that goes into them. You are not going to allow your image on the cover of Time unless it projects roughly or precisely what you want to project about yourself.

Three of these characters have graced the cover of Time Magazine. Steve Jobs has been on the cover on several occasions during different periods of his and Apple's life history. Ballmer has never been on the cover. I could only find a parody cover on the Website: Fake Steve Ballmer. Which says something already.

We are all instinctual face readers. As social creatures, we read facial characteristics as a part of our daily existence. However, this art or science has a very long history. The ancient Chinese Mien Xiang technique goes beyond interpreting personality traits into indicia of personal destiny. The ins and out of it are much to complicated for a blog post to cover. I will refer to two very readable books on the subject at the end hereof.

Here are the covers with my observations. But I encourage you to make your own. Don't be scientific. Just make a note of your reaction to the images. 

Here they are...

The guy in the middle, Schmidt, just handed the keys to the car over to Larry Page. Brin and Page are co-founders and are obviously much younger than Ballmer and Jobs.  Brin has a slightly higher forehead which could imply braininess. But they are both obviously brainy.  Their big friendly disarming smiles. Page is a Russian. My experience with Russians has been a smile can easily disguise other character traits. But who knows. Generally, they both look like regular people that would not raise your hackles on the street.

The next three are much more visually intense in my humble opinion.

[I know I flipped Brin and Page, see the comments below. I'm not gonna change the first image because it will look the same.] 

First, I want to confess that I have not read any books about this guy nor have i seen the movie. Like Brin and Page he is obviously young. However, to me this is an unnaturally aloof face. He has big baby eyes, but that blank stare sounds off all kinds of warning lights. You meet a face like this in real life and you just don't know what to expect. Is he manipulating, insincere or just plain cold and calculating. Rather ironic given that he is supposed to the king of social media realm.

Is it surprising to you that he has all kinds of legal snafus surrounding him?

This is a man in the second half of his life. He has the chiseled look of elderly experience and his bushy eye brows, high brow and intense facial lines are sage like in appearance. Coupled with his knack for verbal communication, it is no wonder he is the skilled promotor that he is. I know it is easy enough to say. But he simply looks the part that he plays. The Apple guru.

If you read the recent Fortune article about Job's management style, you will learn that he can be a totally ruthless manger in the event of a failure. He apparently pulled a big "Trump" on the "Mobile Me" managers when the product got panned by Walt Mossberg of the WSJ. I guess it is not surprising when you think about it. Success is more often than not, serious business.

Here is Ballmer...

By all accounts, Ballmer likes to project the image of being a boisterous MS zealot. He sees himself as the leader who stirs the troops, which is what he has to do since he has no engineering or programming credentials. The problem is, when you look at Google images here are the kind of images you will find.

I guess I don't have to tell you what these images say to me. This guy is dangerous. Is it any wonder that MS has such a hard time with acquisitions? It is apparently because no one wants to deal with this.

So why is Skype happy to be acquired by MS? Apparently because there are people there who have no intention of sticking around after the closing. The timing of the transaction is apparently dictated by investors and managers who want to lock in a price instead of waiting for an IPO.

Ballmer is different from the other three in another important respect. He is not a founder. Like Schmidt at Google, Ballmer was brought in to run the organization for the founders. He is a whip cracker. His bandwith and instincts in terms of product development and market/technological direction has not been very good. Since he is not an engineer or designer, he relies heavily on strategic acquisitions for product development. But he has been terrible at executing due to his "screwball" personality (remember Yahoo?).

My conclusion is there is really a fascinating diversity of leadership personality here. If you like to follow these four corporate horses, simply looking at the personalities at the top is an exercise that should not be overlooked and using face reading as a tool is an interesting approach.

The two books I recommend on face reading are: Mian Xiang, Discover Face Reading by Joey Yap and Face Reading: How To Know Anyone at a Glance by Barbara Roberts (this latter book is very straight forward and easy to apply right out of the box).

I will leave you with an excerpt from Ms. Roberts book which will be very handy assessing Central bankers, Wall Street terrorists, politicians,  nutty CEOs, Iranian Presidents, serial junkers and other forms of deranged psychopaths.

Bon appetite...

Practice on this for starters:

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