Evaluating the 'Doofus Factor' In Corporate Governance 204
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."
Do a test to find the psychopaths/sociopaths... (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a recent Horizon programme (BBC) which said that psychopaths are 4 times more likely to be in the boards of businesses etc., than in other jobs.
Not surprising. I knew these people are good at manipulating, on my website I named a bunch since 2003 related to airtravel industry and Schiphol in particular, and that is actually what they are often picked for. To manipulate in the media etc. I'm not sure if this was just a recap of old research or new, if new then these researchers are not too bright (then again, what can you expect in the social sciences).
One of these researchers said it was hard to find the psyochopaths. Oh really? I can pick them out almost instantly. A good tool is reversible arguments. E.g. one such a-hole working for a dutch airport that wanted to expand said of those who were opposed and stopped it multiple times in court that 'a few times is ok, but this is ridiculous'. The same can be said of those a-holes of that airport. There plannes had been blocked by the courts, and yet these a-holes kept going against it and making new plans and/or getting the judgement overturned. So, he did exactly what he accused the opposing party of because it was unacceptable.
Try it! Look at someone you think is the biggest a-hole you ever saw (which are typically psychopaths who care nothing about anyone except themselves), and try looking for a reversible argument. I bet you will find one ore probably multiple.
Once we get rid of these people in boards of companies, perhaps life will improve.
Oh yes, the programme also said that these psychopaths can manipulate, make themselves look good to some people, but their performance is crap... Doesn't surprise me again, reminds me of former Schiphol director Cerfontaine, who has never amounted to anything, never did anything useful for any company even if the guys who hire him think so.
Even worse actually is that such morons (don't call them clever, they are not, as I said, with a few things to look out for you can easily push through their bulllshit-artistry), are even gettign honorary jobs at universities, perverting students...
Re:Do a test to find the psychopaths/sociopaths... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Do a test to find the psychopaths/sociopaths... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:boards don't really make any sense (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a very insightful comment - few people seem to understand how heavily corporate boards are "cross-pollinated" with one another's members. The same is basically true of the major shareholders for many companies as well. There's a prevailing notion that shareholders are basically a large and broad field of individual "Mom and Pop" investors when in many cases the shareholders constitute a small and deeply entrenched class of extremely wealthy individuals or trusts who own significant holdings across many industries.
I'm confused... (Score:5, Interesting)
Stumbled upon an interesting search topic (Score:4, Interesting)
2002: Fiorina says HP may get out of the PC business.
2004: The Uncertain Promise of Utility Computing
2005: HP CEO Carly Fiorina to step down.
. . . An Engineer's view of Carly Fiorina's Leadership (Story later retracted by TechnologyReview on the grounds that they can no longer vouch for it. Interesting.. )
. . . HP and Apple Separate; Apple gets custody. (OOPS!)
2006: Forbes now thinks Carly saved HP
. . . HP regains throne as top PC maker
2007: Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina hired by Fox News
2011: This article, which suggests, again, that Fiorina was perhaps making the right moves all along.
As much as the geek crowd hated to see what was happening to HP, it definitely that perhaps Cloud Computing and handhelds were the go too thing after all and that the execs that fired her just couldn't see The Big Picture. One for sure though, is as sad as it was to see the engineering innovation go, it's even sadder to see the company struggling to recover from the series of "oops" that sent it into it's current downward spiral.
Re:Interesting problem (Score:4, Interesting)
You should review Yahoo's DEF-14A [sec.gov]. Yes, the top three stockholders appeared to be funds. No, they're probably not trading it actively, because trying to buy or sell 90 million shares is guaranteed to move the price against you. Yes, they're interested in the company's chief officers, but probably only for quarterly profit, and not the long-term (decades and beyond) success of Yahoo!.
You can bet your ass that every HFT operation knows YHOO; there is always a person behind the algorithm. And yes, there's probably a large share volume being traded by HFT algorithms and market makers. However, the total number shares owned by these organizations at "voting time" is probably next to nothing. You don't get voting rights just for having the stock passed through your hands: you actually have to hold onto it (at least for one day), which is antithetical to any form of day-trading.
Someone who is entrusting their entire savings to the stock market is either (1) young, (2) stupid, or (3) isn't paying attention. For retirement investments, the stock market is advertised as high-risk/high-reward and is not suitable for lump-sum liquidation. I agree with you that too many Americans don't treat it this way, and this is a travesty. But please don't be bitter at the stock market for being the speculative arena that it always has been.
Re:Do a test to find the psychopaths/sociopaths... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [ted.com].
As for
Perhaps you need to be a marginal pedophile to be a priest?
Re:Money (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:On a scale of 1-10... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.