skills Developments

Given the state of collapse in the financial and auto sectors, the lack of leadership song is one of the most overplayed singles this holiday season.
If you can’t get enough lists or gloom and doom stories, here’s another one. The Free Enterprise Action Fund identified the five worst chief executives who are not at the helm of a financial collapse. The group makes no attempt to hide its conservative political orientation and takes executives to task for what it perceives to be a pursuit of liberal causes.
The winners of this year’s dubious award are Jeff Immelt of General Electric, Bob Iger of the Walt Disney Company, Jim Rogers of Duke Energy, Jim Mulva of ConocoPhillips and Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical.
Leading a company that is not mired in financial freefall is a huge caveat as the news offers a daily diet of stories about short-sighted decisions made by leaders of institutions who only looked toward the next quarterly report while chasing every dollar.
Immelt is criticized for failing to live up to the expectations of shareholders (which got the economy into such a mess) and for GE’s contracts with Iran, which are not being renewed and are winding down, according to the Washington Post. As if GE’s suspension of $50 million in revenue generated from contracts in Iran will change the calculus in the Middle East. More importantly, the U.S. Government is heading toward a 30 year anniversary of no diplomatic relations with Iran, another sign of absentee leadership.
Iger is faulted for not selling a DVD of his company’s supposedly controversial series on the events that preceded the attacks of 2001 which, when compared with billions in shareholder losses suffered in other companies, is trivial. The remaining three are slammed for backing cap and trade pollution control policy which permits companies that exceed pollution standards to sell credits to companies that fail to meet environmental standards.
What’s missing is an inclusion of decisions that damaged the company or hurt employees, a real casualty of failed leadership. A decision about whether to sell a product on the open market is simply a question of strategy, not poor judgment.
So the list is flawed, a case of partisan politics overshadowing the real issue. Nonetheless, let’s hope the institute or some other watchdog keeps the spotlight on poor executives hot. You can always learn more from the mistakes of poor CEOs than from shareholder reports touting their successes. As the world learned all too late, examples of bad leadership are abundant.