Page 263 - Executive Warfare

The New Bosses

chairman Patricia Dunn was so upset by leaks to the press that she author-
ized a highly unusual, if not illegal, secret investigation of her fellow direc-
tors and reporters that included accessing their private phone records and
putting tracers on their e-mails. This particular moment of obsessiveness
ended in a Congressional hearing.
The paranoid mood is one reason that I don’t serve on public company
boards anymore despite having been asked many times. Boards are now
bogged down in minutiae. They no longer spend their time helping to run
the company but instead spend it ensuring that proper procedures are
followed, that the reports are correct, and that the i’s are dotted and the
t’s are crossed.
If you want to rise in this new environment, you have to be reassuring
to these nervous Nellies. You have to go the extra mile now to appear to
be a responsible executive who will not
get your directors in trouble. The mere
suspicion of a problem is a taint that IT’S NOT AS IF
you can’t get rid of now. EVERYONE WHO
As soon as your name is raised for a COMES TO BOARD
promotion, a director may ask, “Didn’t MEETINGS NOW IS
we have an investigation of a financial WEARING
irregularity in his area a few years ago?” BIRKENSTOCKS.
Even if nothing was found, suddenly THEY MAY NOT
there is a pig on the table. It may not COME STRAIGHT
oink, but that pig has your name on it. FROM THE
If there really is a problem or a lag in ORGANIZATION’S
your performance, you are more likely CLUB, BUT THEY
to be thrown on a sacrificial fire these ARE STILL PLENTY
days than at any other time in modern CLUBBY.
history. A recent Booz Allen study
found that, in 1995, only one out of
eight CEOs who left their organizations did so because they were forced
out; by 2006, it was one out of three.

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