C.E.O.

A Lose/Lose Proposition

Say you’re a highly paid executive that has been brought in to run a company that’s having very specific problems. You have a bulging retirement liability, soaring healthcare costs, increasing competition from foreign companies, and threats to your security from outside forces wanting to steal your secrets and take over your operations.

In addition to an Ivy League education and a great deal of experience in government, you have also been previously employed at a high level in private industry. Your father even served as CEO of this same company years ago, so you have some intimate knowledge of the problems relating to the day to day operations this giant corporation.

Now suppose that you present a list of things that you as CEO want to do in an effort to solve your company’s problems, but the members of your board of directors hyperventilate, faint, and scream bloody murder to the shareholders over every single one of the line items in your plan. Some ideas save money, some are costly, and some require that your employees and shareholders accept some limitations in an effort to improve your overall situation.

After years of dissent, in the end your board only allows you to implement about half of your ideas, they limit and change the ones you do get to enact, and as time moves on they continue to kick and scream and criticize your efforts and nit-pick the results you obtain.

Finally, as the company slides toward insolvency, a group of your hostile competitors comes in and takes over operations—leaving you and your board of directors out of a job and causing your shareholders to lose all of their investment.

The board blames ALL of the failure on you, in spite of their responsibility in preventing you from implementing your plans. You lied, you mislead, you were incompetent, you didn’t have a plan, they say.

That would SUCK royally, wouldn’t it?

Now you know how President Bush probably feels…