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Once upon a time there was a Corporation run by a CEO who made one bad decision after another, with disastrous results, while secretly funneling Corporation resources to his own personal associates, at great added expense to the Corporation.
Prior to the CEO appointment, the Corporation had been on sound financial footing, with a balanced budget and steady growth and a happy workforce. After being initially appointed in a shady, controversial backroom deal, the new CEO browbeat the Board of Directors into a hostile takeover of a weak competitor, claiming the weak company posed a serious threat to the market position of the Corporation. He further claimed that the takeover would almost immediately pay for itself. He noted that the CEO of the smaller company was unpopular with his employees, and assured the Board that the company's employees would welcome the new leadership. With some dissent, the Board approved the hostile takeover based on the scenario presented. Meanwhile, the CEO slashed Corporation investments in research and development, reduced the workforce, and borrowed money at a record-setting rate, funneling the savings and borrowed money into increasing his own salary and that of the Board of Directors, claiming that it would result in new growth of the Corporation.
Every prediction he made to support his decisions turned out to be wildly off the mark. Instead, as it turned out, the company hostilely taken over actually had no products - not even in their pipeline (a fact that the CEO was likely aware of). The cost of the takeover, far from "paying for itself", was enormous, and growing by the minute, as the taken-over company’s workforce strongly resented the new leadership and sabotaged its initiatives. Meanwhile, much of the money directed towards this takeover had been mismanaged- even, inexplicably "disappeared"!- to the tunes of billions of dollars. As a result, the company has swiftly turned around from a positive cash flow to its deepest debt ever, with slow growth only starting to regain some of the lost ground years later after a long period of drastic shrinking.
Meanwhile, with the CEO continuing to be focused on trying to tame the hostile takeover and funnel the borrowed money to his backroom buddies, the CEO gets a phone call that one of the original Corporation factories is about to get hit by a runaway train that is currently 300 miles away but bearing down fast. There is time to act to move the Corporation's valuable equipment out of the way, but instead the CEO just hangs up, ignores it and hopes for the best. The train crashes into the factory, and then starts to go up in flames, but the CEO continues to ignore it, not turning on the sprinkler system until a week after the fires go out by themselves.
The CEO now tells the stockholders that, although his plan has been difficult to implement, we have to stick with him or else the money thrown at the problems that he caused will have been spent in vain. The Board of Directors, enjoying their own lucrative and secure positions, heartily agree. They point out that the people complaining about the CEO are “all just so negative”, with no plan of their own for making the hostile takeover work better.
The stockholders are confused, until one shareholder stands up at the annual meeting and says:
“I don’t claim to know how someone will get us out of this mess, but I sure as hell know it’s not going to be the people who got us into it!”
“FIRE the CEO who is responsible for all the bad decisions! Fire the Board members who continue to go along with him! WE NEED NEW LEADERSHIP!”
Fire the CEO (Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld)!
Fire the irresponsible Board Members who continue to enable his bad decisions (Gerlach/Santorum)!
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Santorum and Gerlach are PROVEN BAD “DECIDERS”!!! People who are consistently this wrong should be removed from office!
We need a new CEO and Board of Directors that have proven skills in management of Corporation resources in a manner that will foster growth and profit for the stockholders. They don't need to have a plan yet to make the takeover work better- they just need to have the experience, judgment, and integrity that we can trust to make the right decisions and correct the course we are on.
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