Leaders are slagged off all the time by those who know nothing, surely they are big enough to take the odd attack from peers?
‘I’M SPEECHLESS,” Larry Ellison said last week about the appointment of Leo Apotheker as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Only it turned out the Oracle chief wasn’t speechless at all. He had rather a lot to say and e-mailed various newspapers to protest that HP had chosen “a guy who was recently fired because he did such a bad job of running SAP”, adding, “the HP board needs to resign en masse”.
Two days later, Jack Welch turned out not to be speechless either when it came to rubbishing the appointment. The HP board had “committed sins”, he said. “They end up blowing up the chief executives and don’t have anyone else in mind to come in. Where the hell was the leadership development? Who are these board members?”
What is happening? Is it now okay for business leaders to launch vigilante attacks on each other when they think they spot incompetent behaviour? Has the dreary fashion of looking the other way and minding your own business come to an end? It would be great if it had.
When I started work as a journalist a quarter of a century ago, there were a few bold British business figures who were happy to say what they thought. But when Lord Weinstock and Sir John Harvey-Jones died, bad mouthing died with them. Modern chief executives seem to have no opinions, especially not negative ones. If they feel one coming on, they have been trained by their lawyers and PR advisers to suppress it.
I have quite often had the experience of interviewing a business leader who said something about another company that was not interesting enough to print, only for them to phone up afterwards in a panic, pleading with me for their innocuous remarks to be scrubbed from the record. Everyone lives in mortal dread of getting into trouble. Chief executives are all shacked up together in a glass house in which no stones ever get thrown.
So does the crossness over HP mark a general change? I fear it doesn’t: Ellison has always done as he chooses, and in any case has a long and horrid history with SAP. And Welch feels able to throw stones because he is retired and will never need to do business with the HP board. He is a pundit, and being bland doesn’t sell books or fill lecture halls.
I can’t help wishing that others would follow, as such vicious attacks serve two important purposes. The first is the sheer fun of it all; everyone loves a good punch-up. On FT.com, the headline “Oracle fury at HP choice of chief” was infinitely more clicked on than, say “Eurostar places €600m trains order” – even though the latter is arguably more important.
More than that, though, it is good for senior people to speak out, because it makes the discussion better. The internet bristles with the low-grade views of people who know nothing. Everyone slags off everyone else; it’s a great global pastime. All leaders are used to having virtual rotten tomatoes slung at them from nobodies, so surely they are big enough to take the odd attack from people who actually know what they are talking about?
Whether Ellison is right about Apotheker I have no idea. But Welch’s view about the inept changing of the guard at HP is correct and needed saying. HP has 150,000 employees – so it is impossible to believe that none of them was good enough to be groomed for the top slot. We know that internal candidates are far less likely to fail than external ones and we know that boards need to focus on this. I’m on a board myself and Welch’s reminder makes me feel properly anxious.
At the very least, what the HP spat shows is that there is a gap in the market for more feather-rufflers among top people. Even if chief executives feel they have to keep quiet as holding their tongues is helpful when it comes to holding on to their jobs, free speech could be something they look forward to in retirement. The job of corporate hell-raiser strikes me as much more worthwhile than the more common retirement route of joining a government taskforce and keeping lips zipped tighter than ever.
Off the top of my head I can think of one person who would fill such a slot perfectly: Carol Bartz of Yahoo. On YouTube there is a clip of her banging on about her business that has been watched by just 300 people. But there is another clip – “Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz tells Michael Arrington to F-off” that has been watched by 209,506. If she does get kicked out at Yahoo for not being popular enough to lead the company, she would be just perfect as a corporate vigilante. – (Copyright 2010 The Financial Times Limited)
