Let’s just play pretend for a short minute. Let’s say that there is a company out there named Company A. It is a good company. It has a long history of success and it is highly respected in the industry. It’s had its bumps and bruises over the years, like any company. But it has survived, thrived, and become a great place to work.
Now, things got a little rocky with Company A a few years ago. There was a lot of discontentment in the company about how things were run. It seemed like some people wanted the company to get more progressive and some others thought the company should stick to what made it so successful. (There were many more underlying issues, too, but you could boil down the overall problem to that big difference.) When the last CEO was going to step down, this all came to a head. The two camps clashed over who the new CEO should be. One camp thought that the CEO should come from within, like it almost always had - ironically it was the group that was advocating more change that wanted to hire the more traditional choice. The other camp thought that Company A needed to go outside to get a CEO with fresh ideas that was not colored by the company’s biases and history. In the end, the company chose the outsider as the CEO. The decision left the company very split and created aftershocks that were very troubling to the workers and other companies in the industry.
So the new CEO took over and immediately started shaking things up, as he said he would. He fired a lot of the middle management and filled those positions with people he knew, as he said he would. He overturned some of the policies that were in place, as he said he would. He didn’t connect so well with a lot of the workers, which wasn’t surprising since he came from a completely different background. As you would expect, a lot of the people at the company were not happy with things. They didn’t want this CEO in the first place. But this is how business goes.
Then things started to get a little weird…
The CEO started to do some things that - completely independent of what he thought about the future of Company A - were very disturbing. There was another company next door to this company - we will call it Company M. They were in the same industry, but nowhere near competitors. The CEO got angry because Company M next door didn’t have as nice of landscaping and so a bunch of the squirrels from their property kept getting across the property line. The CEO demanded that Company M build a giant fence between the two companies so the squirrels couldn’t cross over. The facts that these squirrels could climb the fence, dig under the fence, run around the fence, find places where the fence was broken, or catch a ride with people going from Company A to Company M made no difference. Neither did the fact that the second company had absolutely no plan to build the fence anyway.
The CEO wasn’t content to just act combative with the company next door. There was another company on the other side of town that was run by the halfwit son of the former owner, who also wasn’t too bright. We will call this Company Nutso. They fancied themselves as a competitor of Company A. To anyone observing this posturing by Company Nutso, the entire proposition was sheer lunacy. Company A was the best widget maker in the whole city. What Company Nutso made was barely considered widgets at all. Rather they looked like something a group of preschoolers would create when given the materials to make a widget. They would be thrown together, covered with clumps of glue and sparkles. Flames would be drawn on them with crayons. The R would always be written backwards. But Company Nutso kept insisting they were amazing at widget making. Company A’s CEO didn’t leave these ridiculous comments alone. Instead, he kept wildly freaking out and would tweet out comments on the company twitter account taking shots at Company Nutso. He kept threatening them and insulting them. However the CEO didn’t consider the fact that, while Company Nutso was atrocious at making widgets, it was simply fantastic at raising fire ants. They had enormous fire ant hills all over their property. These ants would obey every command and could worm themselves into everything. And they would frequently unleash these fire ants onto other companies’ properties - just to cause mischief and mayhem. Even though it seemed like a bad choice, playing with fire ants, the CEO just couldn’t stop himself.
His refusal to work well with other CEOs and companies within the industry was quite disturbing. During the annual convention for major companies in the widget industry, the CEO did everything he could to irritate all of the other CEOs. He said that he would not continue to work together with Company E and Company F on their joint widget improvement projects. He insulted just about every other CEO. He skipped out on meetings he was committed to and even was seen pushing another CEO out of the way in a group photo. Most baffling, though, was his bizarre interactions with Company Red’s CEO. They seemed to hit it off very well, to the point that some speculated Company A’s CEO would rather be working for Company Red. The worst example of this related to the WidgetMAX. Company A had created WidgetMAX in conjunction with Company E and Company F. They were planning to roll out WidgetMAX in thirty days and everyone was working very hard to make sure there were no problems with the launch. But the CEO told Company Red all about WidgetMAX as well as several journalists that were at the conference … and some waiters, valet drivers, maids, and even a traveling minstrel. In fact, the only people he didn’t talk to about WidgetMAX were the CEOs of Company E and Company F. By the end of the conference, most of the other companies were considering severing ties with Company A.
But this wasn’t all. The CEO seemed to completely lose his sense of reason when he got angry. A perfect example of this was when he started attacking the local high school’s football team because he didn’t like the way they walked into the stadium - a stadium built by generous donations from Company A. He railed against the players in meetings and flew off the handle because he didn’t think they were being respectful with their entrances. He cursed about several of the players and insisted they should be cut by the team. This had absolutely no bearing on how Company A actually ran, mind you, but the CEO just couldn’t bear the slight. He didn’t limit his outrage to the football team. He also got into a fight with the local high school’s basketball team. They were a little hesitant to come to Company A’s factory for their annual tour and career day, due to the well-documented friction within the company. The CEO once again used the company’s twitter account and publicly withdrew the invitation from the team. He also would use the same twitter account to make random verbal assaults on people that worked at the company, that lived in the town, that worked at other companies. He demanded that people who didn’t even work for Company A should fire employees or shut down their own companies because they didn’t agree with him. He kept tweeting out violent cartoons and comments about the person that he defeated in the CEO vote. Anyone who questioned the CEO's behavior, decisions, fashion sense, or dessert options would immediately be besieged by an onslaught of insults and threats -- more often than not on the company twitter account.
As long as the CEO was doing a good job running Company A, it could all be justified. At least that was what a lot of workers were saying. But he wasn’t even taking care of Company A. He frequently bailed on important planning and strategy meetings to play golf. Even though Company A was cash-strapped and in great debt to several banks, the CEO kept taking expensive trips using Company A’s resources. He frequently made comments about Company A that were not even true. He routinely attacked the publication team that put out the monthly newsletter, saying that they were lying about what was going on in the company. There was a group of employees from the mailroom who had taken to creating an unofficial newsletter during their lunch break. They would write it on paper towels from the employee bathroom and stick copies up around the building with tape and used gum. The CEO began referencing these paper towels as the real company newsletter and even transferred some of the mail clerks to run the publication department. At one end of the major production facilities for Company A, there was a large hydroelectric dam that generated power for the entire complex. There had been several problems caused by the dam. Leaks had sprung, flooding some ares of the complex. It shut down productivity for that entire sector for months, costing workers their jobs. In response, the CEO threw a picnic for the workers in that sector and thanked them all for coming. He then bragged about how many workers showed up and then mumbled something about the allure of a really good potato salad, took a selfie, and went to the bowling alley. Several of the engineers who built and maintained the dam came to the CEO with concerns that the dam was possibly unsafe. It was older and needed some upkeep. It also was overworked and would benefit from some alterations to the energy use policies in the company. The CEO refused to listen to the engineers and fired them. He replaced them with some guys who liked model trains and used to dress up as engineers who didn’t believe in the fact that dams could fail. He got rid of the employee training team and hired someone to head up training that had spent her career to that point as the owner of a bookstore. He even sided with a group of workers who wanted to publicly fire and banish anyone who had green eyes. And to top it all off, he hired his children to serve as CFO, CIO, and COO - even though their experience to that point had been shopping for clothes, watching television, and caddying at the golf range.
Now, at this point in our pretend story, don’t you think that the company should possibly rethink its decision to bring on this particular CEO. We haven’t even gotten into how he ran the company. The policies he enacted within the company seems irrelevant, truthfully. All of the hostility that led to his hiring wouldn't even be involved in this decision. The employees from both side of the divide should take a second and look at how things are going and at least ask if this is the person to be in charge. Instead of defending these increasingly ludicrous behaviors, instead of trying to justify everything this CEO did, employees who really care about Company A should take a pause and seriously perform a quality control check, right? How is this a beneficial direction for the company? How far will the CEO go? At what point do the workers do something? I don’t care if a group of workers felt that this CEO candidate was more concerned with their welfare at the outset and even agreed with some of the measures taken within the company. There still should be some part of all of this that makes THAT group go, “You know? This CEO is a little unhinged. Maybe this isn’t the best dude to be in charge of my life and livelihood.” It becomes about much more than the internal mechanisms of the company at that point. This CEO is ruining the reputation of Company A. He is destroying everything that Company A has stood for over the years. The question isn’t if he is causing damage; it is how much damage he is going to cause before he quits, gets fired, or finishes his contract. What state will Company A be in by the time that happens? Right?
"The president is the CEO of the country.”
Nikki Haley, United States Ambassador to the United Nations
May 14, 2017
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