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Evaluating the 'Doofus Factor' In Corporate Governance
PolygamousRanchKid writes with this quote from an article in the Economist:
"The directors of Yahoo! were 'so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country' that they fired Carol Bartz as chief executive 'to show that they're not the doofuses that they are.' That was Ms Bartz's typically blunt verdict, offered to Fortune after she was dismissed with a phone call by the internet firm's chairman, Roy Bostock, on September 6th. She would say that. Yet Ms Bartz's criticisms of the board have been sympathetically received. Firing a chief executive by phone smacks of hasty, panicky decision-making. And Yahoo!'s board already had a poor reputation, having turned down an offer from Microsoft that valued the firm at several times what it is worth today. It is not just Yahoo!'s board that is feeling the heat. The directors of HP, another stumbling Silicon Valley giant, have been accused of serial ineptitude spanning the appointment and dismissal of Carly Fiorina as chief executive, the firing of her successor, Mark Hurd, and the selection of his replacement, Léo Apotheker. ... There is growing demand for boards to undergo a formal evaluation process, to assess both the performance of each individual board member and how they work together as a group. The European Union is considering new regulations that would require an independent evaluation of the board every three years."
Junk ... this is an example of statistical manipulation for emphasis. If it is four times more likely to be psychopaths , and the ratio is 1 in a million. Then all you have is 4 in a million.
Simply put, these groups suffer from group think. Happens to every group, and we likley suffer from it as well (e.g. in any group of like thinking people say organized religions, sport clubs, political followers). They can walk down a one way dead and each will pat each other on the back all the way.
PS: Do not forget, it may take a marginal psychopath to run those companies. Your statistics did not say if these psychopaths are the successful CEOs or not.
Sadly when you are dealing with a doofus corp you can't even hire from within because middle management is usually dipshits as well.
I had one client that I told I didn't have time to be their admin after setting up their system, but I'd put them in touch with a couple of competent admins that were rock solid, take their pick. What did they do? Some PHB decided 'they cost too much! i know a guy who's a wiz at computers! I bet he could do it" and I bet the admins out there can already see where THIS is going.
Well I get called back in a little over a year after their "wiz" got caught looking at porn and running a Q3 server when he was supposed to be working and they were having "little problems"...little problems my Irish ass. this genius had GOT RID OF THE DESKTOPS that I had bought because they were 'too weak" and built gamer desktops piecemeal from tigerdirect, so give up making images or deploying anything as NOTHING matched, got rid of my standard Sonicwall for a bunch of those shitty blue DLink routers and was using a bunch of HOME CONNECTIONS from various ISPs. Somebody want more speed? he'd hire another ISP. Needless to say I had to shitcan the whole thing but the PHB had already gotten his bonus and moved on so didn't get the blame.
And it is THAT, that right there, that to me marks the dufus problem in a nutshell. it is upward failure where doing dumbshit yields a quick gain followed by a HORRIBLE outcome, but the gain gets the dufus moved up or a "selling point" on his resume and he/she is out of their before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
I mean how many guys here have dealt with a company butchering IT and then they acted amazed when the shit falls apart? or tries to get too much done with too little and the first real problem is a trainwreck of biblical proportions? That is why I got out of corporate, got tired at beating my head against the wall while dealing with shit that went right off the stupid meter scale. Hell I have a buddy still in who actually got drug to regional HQ by a PHB that wanted him fired because, and I quote "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who I can speak to! You WILL let my emails through from Melissa through or you're fired!" That's right folks, he was fighting FOR the right to get infected! Lucky the regional head knew a tiny bit and watched the news so he knew what the Melissa bug was, otherwise he could have been fired.
I just can't take that level of dumbshit anymore, I just can't. At least with SOHOs, SMBs, and Home Users, they KNOW they don't know shit and that is why they hire me, so that I can tell them what to do and help them be smart and safe. With corporate there always seemed to be someone who knew just enough to be dangerous as hell, and had just enough power to serious fuck the whole works. Some guy who thinks he knows IT, or some bean counter who think the gear will last another two years when they cheapskated and bought cheap shit in the first place that started dying when the warranty went, just ignorant dumb stupid ass...ugh. If you still do corporate? My prayers are with you friend, may you have a strong stomach and have an immunity to headaches.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Why is it that sacking peons as fast and impersonally as possible makes you a strong, visionary, leader who is willing to make tough decisions; but sacking your CEO good and hard makes you a panicky dumbass?
Junk
Interesting that you just think you know this, even though the statistical rate of psychopaths is 1-4% for men.
/needing/ to be a marginal psychopath to run a company -- this suggests that you really don't know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is a mimic that cheats on the social programming on regular people. Thinking that psychopaths have a place in society is like think that pedophiles have a place in society. It is a dangerous pathology.
Every human being should do themselves a favour and watch Kathryn Shultz's TED lecture on being wrong.
As for
Perhaps you need to be a marginal pedophile to be a priest?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
hairyfeet opined:
THAT, that right there, that to me marks the dufus problem in a nutshell. it is upward failure where doing dumbshit yields a quick gain followed by a HORRIBLE outcome, but the gain gets the dufus moved up or a "selling point" on his resume and he/she is out of their before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
What you have just described is the fundamental career philosophy behind the MBA. To state it another way, the default MBA business strategy is: "Ramp up short-term profitability by whatever means is necessary/convenient, regardless of long-term consequences for the company, because by the time those consequences arise, you will have been hired away to work at a different company, at a higher pay grade, and dealing with those consequences will have become somebody else's problem.
The problem for the Western economy is that, ever since the Reagan administration (or the Thatcher administration, or the Mitterand administration, or ... but you get the picture), MBAs have progressively grown in influence to a position of utterly dominating corporate governance in every country outside of China. It is they who are responsible for exporting the bulk of Western industrial production to developing countries, it is they who were responsible for creating and marketing poisonous mortgage-backed derivative securities (and thereby crashing the global economy - a process that is only now reaching its middle, rather than ending), and it is they who dominate corporate boardrooms.
It's not so much that they are psychopaths. It's that they have been trained to be psychopaths by the most prestigious business schools in the Western world. And this all in the name of delivering maximum value to shareholders.
The problem with the MBA philosophy is that the only shareholders that matter - because they are by far the largest shareholders - are institutional shareholders: insurance companies, pension funds, banks, and so on. And these shareholders' investment portfolios are run by - you guessed it - MBAs, who have absolutely no loyalty to anyone or anything except themselves. They'll kick a fundamentally-sound stock to the curb in a heartbeat, so long as their spreadsheets tell them that a company down the block is offering higher short-term profits, regardless of how unsound that new company's long-term outlook might be, because they don't invest for the long term.
Which, incidentally, is why Wall Street and its fraternal counterparts have been experiencing day-to-day mood swings like a bipolar teenager with PMS. In fact, that phenomenon is a result of the MBA-mediated migration to algorithmically-based automated trading systems, which, by intent completely ignore long-term value in favor of short-term gains produced by, essentially, day-trading on a massive scale.
And, short of outlawing MBAs and hanging all existing holders of the degree, I see absolutely zero chance that this utterly broken system that rewards only MBAs will - or, for that matter, can - change for the better any time in the forseeable future.
Check out my novel.