7 Bad Habits of Unsuccessful People by Sydney Finkelstein

Author:Sydney Finkelstein [Sydney Finkelstein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business/Leadership
ISBN: 9780983000143
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2014-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

It’s My Way or No Way

Effective leaders need support, and they prize loyalty. Success depends on your ability to inspire people to get behind your strategies. This talent becomes a fault when you equate dissent with disloyalty and begin firing or disregarding the opinions of anyone who disputes your decisions or suggests that trouble might be brewing.

It’s surprising how many times people come up to me after hearing me describe the seventh bad habit. Invariably, they say they know exactly what I’m talking about, because it’s happening in their companies. One executive told me it was almost a badge of honor to be fired by his CEO, because it proved that the victim was both smart and brave.

Enron is the hands-down best example I know of this very destructive behavior. You may recall that the longtime CEO, Ken Lay, and his successor, Jeffrey Skilling, were playing shell games with the company’s books to inflate income and hide colossal debts in obscure off-the-books enterprises. When Sherron Watkins, the vice president for corporate development, warned Lay in August 2001 that the company might “implode in a wave of accounting scandals,” he promised that the company’s law firm would review the issues. She protested that Lay’s plan amounted to a conflict of interests. Other Enron executives wanted to fire her, but Lay vetoed that response - not because he respected her view, but in order to avoid a lawsuit and damaging publicity.

Lay wasn’t shy, however, about wanting other critics fired, even outsiders. Enron was already under scrutiny before Watkins’ warning. Bethany McLean, a writer for Fortune, had been working on a piece about the company when she became mystified by its arcane accounting. She went to its Texas headquarters and confronted Enron executives with the problems. They brushed her off. But when she flew back to New York, she was followed by the Enron corporate jet and CFO Andrew Fastow, who tried to persuade McLean and her editors that the company was solid and the obscurity of its accounting was essential to preserve legitimate secrets.

Fortune stuck with McLean’s story, which appeared on March 5, 2001, under the headline, “Is Enron Overpriced?” Reading it in Houston, a furious Lay called Gerald Levin, CEO of the recently merged AOL-Time Warner, which owned Fortune. He demanded that “that woman” be fired. After checking with McLean and her editors, he called back to tell Lay that the magazine wouldn’t retract the story or issue any corrections, and that McLean would keep her job.

That was the turning point for Enron. Sensing disaster, Skilling resigned as CEO on August 14. Lay got Watkins’ warning the next day. He accepted his lawyers’ predictable assurance that nothing was wrong, but fired Fastow to appease the investment community. Then, when analysts kept besieging him with questions, Lay told them he was no accounting expert and “[y]ou’re getting way over my head,” which was anything but soothing. In December, Enron collapsed in the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

A blizzard of indictments followed. Fastow

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