Ask Slashdot: Would You Fire Your CEO? (cio.com)

As America celebrates a national holiday honoring organized labor, long-time Slashdot reader itwbennett shares this story about the modern workplace: Three years ago, talent management and human resources company Haufe U.S. created a workplace democracy in which C-level leadership is elected by the employees for a one-year term. In an interview with CIO, Kelly Max, who is currently serving as Haufe's CEO, explains how the company got to this point and what they've learned from the experience.

"If you're going to talk about how your employees 'own' the company, if you're going to tout how they all have a voice, why not go all the way and see what happens? Because why not? You already have people working for and with you who elect you every day, who either agree or disagree with you and follow you, so we wanted to make it very transparent," says Max.
This raises an inevitable question for Slashdot readers: would your own organization work as a democracy? So leave your answers here in the comments. Would your company's employees fire your CEO?

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

Does this story have too much Bennett Hasselton, the mastermind behind the algorithm to end the lines for ice at the Burning Man festival?

Why just the CEO?

[houghi]

Would you fire your cow orker? Would you fire the coffee lady or the person sitting at the reception?

To me it depends. Are they doing their job? If so, then no. If they don't, then yes. Not really that hard. What often is the problem is twofold.
1) The amount they get (including bonuses) is not realistic compared to the work they do compared to others. Should they earn more? Sure. Should they earn 200 times more? No.
2) It is often unclear of what his job is. Most of the time it is pretty simple, make as much money for the company as possible. Sometimes it is something else, like "increase the market position to ..." or "increase the market value of the shares".
And that might be something that is not correctly interpreted. Is it possible to achieve these goals and are they realistic or is he achieving them, then no, he should not be fired. What might need to be done is to change the goals.

And there lies the issue. Are the goals something we can agree with or are those the issue? Perhaps we do not want to increase the market value of the company for a buyout. We want to keep as much people employed as possible. Or we want to give better service to customers instead of lowering prices to increase the market share.
And if we are able to change the goals, is he still the best choice for these or not? If not, fire him. If so, all the better.

Just look at him as any employee and treat him the same. I get fired if I don't do my job and so should he, but first ask what that job actually is.

I can be the world best perl programmer and am hired to write perl, but if the rest works with c# what I do is meaningless and a waste of money.

Capitalism is meritocratic

[cloud.pt]

There's no way around it - be it by luck, opportunism, IQ, bank account, family, networking, entrepreneurship, share ownership, influence or the most relevant of all: charisma - leadership these days is acquired through different forms of merit, never democratically. A suffrage for C-level anything is just gonna place more emphases on the least "true-merit" traits of them all.

This is mostly what happens nowadays on evolved democracies, and why they are, ultimately, in decadence. Think about it like so: there's this guy called Trump with no real quality other than bringing a lot of empathy to the table, because a lot of voters are being driven by his isolationism rhetoric which never fails to catch a big chunk of an ever-increasing patriot country's vote. And in my opinion, he's gonna win because the other candidate has a near-50% handicap, from the long-established, yet to be solved gender problem, even more relevant than the previous incumbent's racial minority trait, for the simple fact America has embraced different races a lot more than it has suppressed gender inequality.

This is gonna be equivalent in a company, to a different extent but to similar outcomes - the bottom-of-the-pyramid voters are gonna side with whoever seems to bring more to their table, and candidates just need to find the rhetoric that identifies them as such. If this is, like american politics, mixed up with a candidate-picking system that pre-establishes a small pool of "desirables", no single candidate will truthfully bring anything to the bottom tiers. Winning will be a matter of the best liar. I would likely fire my current CEO if I had one (don't work in that kind of corporate structure) , but the question remains: would we be allowed to pick something better than the status quo?

For a solid case where they should...

[damn_registrars]

Look to Sears. The CEO there is Eddie Lampert, who used various financial manoeuvres to first take over KMart and then Sears. He has zero retail experience. He is known for only attending board meetings via videoconferencing (where he yells at board members). He has passed down illogical orders to the stores that have turned the skeleton crews into Lord of the Flies.

So why haven't they fired him? They can't. His moves placed him as majority share holder as well as CEO. The board has no way to fire him. He is in a can't-lose situation now as with very few exceptions Sears owns the land their stores sit on (even in malls) so once he drives the ship under he has millions of dollars of real estate that he can sell.

Re:What's the point?

[SpaghettiPattern]

I'm always impressed that software devs and project managers and database architects understand business strategy so well that they only need about 10% of the contextual information about what's going on in the business, and no access to financial statements... and yet can tell that the C-suite has it all wrong. Have you ever thought about being CEO? We would love to have you.

A quote from Machiavelli:

Nor, I hope, will you think it presumptuous that a man of low, really the lowest, station should set out to discuss the way princes ought to govern their peoples. Just as artists who draw landscapes get down in the valley to study the mountains and go up to the mountains to look down on the valley, so one has to be a prince to get to know the character of a people and a man of the people to know the character of a prince.

I personally had to learn the hard way what business strategy is. Had (wait I still have) a company fully based on my skills. I realized that I hadn't a clue as to how I could influence the factors around me and so I quit well in time and went permanent to do what I do best. Then I studied business strategy. (Boy was I naive.) The upshot is that I now can argue as to how a technical decision supports our strategic position.

I now see pretty quickly whether a CEO has a strategy or not. Developing a strategy requires analysis, input from many different disciplines and is a hell of a job to take on. Management by decree has nothing to do with strategy. A strategy is documented reasonably well and enables people within the organisation to naturally contribute to it.