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

Next Question

[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?

Re:This is outstanding work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which begs the question: are people using "begs the question" wrong too often?

Under one condition

[Opportunist]

It will be out of a cannon and the parachute he gets isn't golden but mead of lead.

Re:Under one condition

[Sneeka2]

I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference whether the parachute is golden or lead if you're going to fire them out of a cannon. The irony factor will be higher with the gold parachute, so I'd go for that.

Re:Under one condition

[Niggle]

Surely the irony factor would be highest with an iron parachute?

What's the point?

[SpaghettiPattern]

I am not pleased with our CEO. We all aren't. It's a way of life.

I'd settle for one that understands business strategy well and who knows how to keep the company profitable in the mid and in the long term. But those are few and far between.

The employee's choice will inevitably be the most popular one. Which most of the time isn't one bit better than the status quo.

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.

Re:What's the point?

[mattwarden]

Your quote does not apply. I did not say that you can't discuss strategy unless you're a CEO. I mocked the ridiculous attitude that many technical people have about how CEOs have no idea what they are doing and the software developer has it all figured out. It is the lack of humility I am mocking, plus the ignorance of the very real fact that people lower in the org only have partial visibility on one or two silos of business operations, and have no access to financial statements. There is a reason for financial reporting, and people without this data will make conclusions based on things they see (eg, the premium coffee service being canceled) and generally end up making the wrong conclusions. So why would your first assumption be that the people who have all this information and do have experience with strategy are idiots and have it all wrong?

That's what I am mocking. And the magnitude of this egotistical silliness is unique to tech.

Re:What's the point?

[mattwarden]

Some will control information. But it is also a natural result of any organization. If everyone must know everything in order to do their job, you are not organized. That's just not a scalable model beyond a few person company.

Sounds oddly familiar...

[sisterk]

Arthur: Please, *please*, good people, I am in haste! WHO is your CEO?
Woman: No one is.
Arthur: Then who is your board?
Woman: We don't have a board!
Arthur: (suprised) What??
Man: I *told* you! We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune! We're taking
        turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week--
Arthur: (uninterested) Yes...
Man: But all the decisions *of* that officer 'ave to be ratified at a
        special bi-weekly meeting--
Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!
Man: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs--
Arthur: (mad) Be quiet!
Man: But by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major--
Arthur: (very angry) BE QUIET! I *order* you to be quiet!
Woman: "Order", eh, 'oo does 'e think 'e is?
Arthur: I am your king!
Woman: Well I didn't vote for you!

Workers controlling the means of production

[Mjlner]

There is one element of socialism in here. Not all elements, though, so you Americans can start breathing again.

I'm actually all for the democratic control of companies. If nothing else, stupid voters/employees might end up learning that voting for incompetent or corrupt leaders will actually make you end up without a place to work.

Benign dictatorship

[JasterBobaMereel]

The best form of leadership is a Benign/Benovolent dictatorship, this means they are reasonably popular but can get things done and can make the unpopular decisions when needed

The reasons this works for a company, are the same ones that work for a country... ... but if a company stops being profitable they go bust and disappear, whereas when a country does the equivilent you just get a classical dictator

Democracy is a terrible system of government, but it is the least bad system in the long term ....

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.

Re:Why just the CEO?

[Opportunist]

Security and its cost is part of risk assessment. And yes, there is a point where security costs more than it's worth. If the possible damage that could happen is 1000 bucks a month and it costs me more than 1000 bucks a month to secure it, then even certain impact realization would not warrant the security expense because it is actually cheaper to simply accept the damage.

Security needn't generate revenue but it has to lower the assessed risk by as much as it costs. Simple as that. This is, by the way, another reason why the whole TSA security theater is completely bogus.

Requires a knowledge of the job

[petes_PoV]

C-level leadership is elected by the employees for a one-year term.

So how to "ordinary" employees (even ones from a recruitment company) know what qualities to look for in a C-level? Do they understand the legal obligations that C-levelship brings. Do they know what is possible or within scope for a particular "C"?

Or do they simply engage in a beauty contest and vote for people they like, or who make the biggest promises: "vote for me as your CEO and I'll give everyone a pay rise and annual bonus"

It all sounds lovely and group-huggy. But does it actually make the company more successful or a better place to work?

Re:Requires a knowledge of the job

[Opportunist]

Well, looking down the last couple US presidents, "scholars" isn't quite the word that I'd come up with...

Re:Requires a knowledge of the job

[inking]

Coincidentally, the Industrial Revolution occurs in the same time and is entirely oligarchic in nature. You may be interested in reading some works by Robert C. Allen, in particular the very concise Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. There are a number of hypothesis for Europe's industrial success and subsequent increased living standards, from Braudel's coal and colonies to Black Death changing the institutional structure of Europe to be more capitalistic to Europe always being richer but having less food due to lack of rice. However, I am afraid that I am yet to hear a persuasive argument for peasants' suffrage being one of them. In fact, if we look at late comers in East Asia, you would get the very opposite impression with unelected elite bureaucrats largely detached from the political process running the country much more successfully than their democratised counterparts with democracy only coming as a latter bonus and in a form factually very different from liberté, égalité, fraternité.

C-level is at lowest in decades

[jabberw0k]

Why would any company want C leadership these days, when C Programming Language's Tiobe Rating [has] Drop[ped] To Lowest Level in decades? Surely some Python or even a modern Perl leadership would be far superior.

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?

Re:Capitalism is meritocratic

[mschuyler]

That's a nice load of crap you're selling.

We voted for the last president because he was Black (sort of). We're voting for Hillary because she is a woman (sort of). Those are stupid reasons. Neither of these jerks has a "handicap." They have an advantage because of traits that don't qualify them for anything.

Re:HP

[Jayfar]

Can we all vote to fire HP's CEO's. Retrospectively.

In retrospect, you meant retroactively, I think.

I Come to Work

[KermodeBear]

I come to work in order to work and make money. I don't come to work to play politics all day.

Don't work for a public company

[mykepredko]

The biggest problem out there is the next quarter mindset of public companies. Today, public companies are too focused on the end of the quarter and maximizing shareholder returns which means that the employees and customers be damned if they can be squeezed to get another point of EBITDA over the next three months.

The best company I ever worked for was a wholly owned subsidiary in which the CEO/top manager and senior managers worked as a very effective team in keeping employees and customers happy - I should point out that we had a very flat organizational structure which kept things running very well.

We then got bought out and the investors put us up for an IPO. As founders, there was some money thrown our way, BUT the CEO's total focus was turned to what the investor's wanted which meant he had almost no time to devote to the day to day running of the business (which he was excellent at) and, to fill the void, more new executives, who didn't know the business, were brought in along with more than doubling the number of management levels. After a couple of years, the CEO, decided to call in rich and we had a series of new CEOs (and their hangers on) that proceeded to destroy the company.

All the work we had done creating a business that was destroyed in about three years and what made us special was lost along with more than two thirds of the employees with what was once a happy, proud workplace becoming a place for temporary employment.

So, find a place that is wholly owned, doesn't worry about it's stock price, with a small, competent management team.

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:I'd probably fire every CEO I've ever worked un

[sunking2]

Believe it was Sarah Silverman who said along the lines of, 'if all you've ever had are bitchy roomates, you're the bitch'

Re:Yes!

[hambone142]

We would have been better off if we had NO CEO for our company the last 17 years. We've had a succession of worthless "loot and scoot" CEOs that do nothing but destroy the long term viability of the company whilst stuffing their pockets with the company's money.

Now she's selling off portions of the company to make the books look good.

Quite a shame. If she were fired though, she'd leave with tens of millions for driving the stock price down.

Re: This is outstanding work.

[DarkVader]

The amusing thing is that while you're attempting sarcasm, you're actually not wrong.

If enough people start using the word "three" to represent the quantity now known as "two" you would have redefined the word "three" and not done anything at all to math.

Of course, it won't happen, because it's fucking stupid and people won't actually do that, but yes, language works that way.

But "begs the question" has an obvious plain language meaning, and it's not related to an obscure meaning about a logical fallacy. It was actually a mistranslation of Latin that associated it with the logical fallacy in the first place, so being pedantic about it is actually to be wrong.