- Haigh, Gideon. Bad Company: The Strange Cult of the
CEO. London: Aurum Press, 2004. ISBN 1-85410-969-3.
- In this small and quirky book, Haigh puts his finger
precisely on the problem with today's celebrity CEOs. It isn't just
that they're paid obscenely out of proportion to their contribution
to the company, it's that for the most part they don't know all that
much about the company's products, customers, and industry. Instead,
skilled only in management, they attempt to analyse and operate the
company by examining and manipulating financial aggregates. While this
may be an effective way to cut costs and improve short-term operating
results through consolidation, outsourcing and offshoring, cutting
research and development, and reducing the level of customer service,
all these things tend to injure the prospects of the company over the
long haul. But CEOs are mostly compensated based on current
financial results and share price. With length of tenure at the
top becoming ever shorter as executives increasingly job hop among
companies, the decisions a CEO makes today may have consequences
which manifest themselves only after the stock options are cashed
in and his successor is left to sort out the mess. Certainly there
are exceptions, usually entrepreneurs who remain at the helm of the
companies they've founded, but the nature of the CEO rôle in today's
publicly traded company tends to drive such people out of the job,
a phenomenon with which I have had some experience. I call the book
“quirky” because the author draws examples not just from well known
corporate calamities, but also films and works of fiction. He is fond
of literary allusions and foreign phrases, which readers are expected
to figure out on their own. Still, the message gets across, at least
to readers with attention spans longer than the 10 to 30 minute time
slices which characterise most CEOs. The ISBN on the copyright page
is wrong; I've given the correct one here.
June 2004 