The Rebellious CEO by Ralph Nader

Author:Ralph Nader [Nader, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

It’s not clear when he became the open iconoclast, the unsettler of settled, smug ways of running an organization from the top down. He graduated from Princeton in 1940, served as an officer in the Navy during World War II, and attended the Columbia University Business School before working as a stockbroker. In 1949, he went to work for American Express, becoming Vice President of Investments and International Banking Operations of Hertz American Express until 1962, when Lazard Frères acquired Avis. Lazard’s top boss, Andre Mayer, asked him to be the CEO of Avis in 1962 at a $50,000 annual salary. He insisted that he be paid $36,000 “because that’s the top salary for a company that has never earned a nickel for its stockholders.” He set the example quickly. He honed his irreverent sense while spending fourteen years at American Express. He described the company as “rich enough to do—and did—almost everything wrong. In that near-perfect learning environment, I formed a valuable habit of observing what action was taken, considering the opposite course, and then working back, when necessary, to what really made sense.”

Some of his former colleagues didn’t appreciate what they called his smart-aleck attitude there. “If we did so badly while he was here, why did we do so well when he left?” an exasperated senior official at American Express told a reporter. There is no record of a Townsend response, if any. But what he might have said, based on his writings, would be that he was talking about the larger corporate culture and more yardsticks of stifled potential than any increase in profits that may have been due to external economic conditions beneficial to this international company.

Townsend didn’t get his back up when his blasts provoked outrage and rejoinders. To him, it was like bursting a boil—a necessary precondition for corporate bureaucrats looking at themselves in the mirror. What he could not stand was censorship, whether within the corporate institution or by the mass media. After appearing on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show in the early 1980s, where he criticized NBC management, the network banned him. (NBC took years of criticism from the press before my getting on The Tonight Show.) It wasn’t Johnny’s decision; it was upstairs in executive suites or maybe even higher at the executive offices of NBC’s owner, the giant General Electric Company. Townsend was always calm and unperturbed, except for his robust laugh. He followed up his ban by putting out a larger version of his book, titled Further Up the Organization that became a nine-week bestseller.

The corporate wavemaker never made gobs of money, but the ways he made his wealth seemed always casual, low-key, and seemingly effortless. In 1978, he became a top consultant to 20th Century Fox, where his very talented daughter, Claire, worked. His task was to make the company workplace both fun and profitable—the two go together in many ways, he taught. He was also variously on the board or an investor and advisor to Leadership Directories, Inc.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.