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Take This Job and Shove It

When a slash-and-burn CEO takes control, watch out. It's only a short time before a CSO must defend his work and integrity

By CSO Contributor

May 01, 2005 — CSO — How are you doing? No really, answer honestly. How are you doing? Because I hope you're happy out there in "business is just ducky, thank you" land. I hope you see confidence building, and things looking up all over, and lots of rosy reports from really smart businesspeople. You do? Great, I'm happy for you.

But here I am on the flip side. My company's in free fall. What does free fall mean? I'll give you a set of headlines, no problemo. Check out this quick time capsule, covering the recent past:

A slash-and-burn, profits-at-any-long-term-cost kind of guy, a darling of Wall Street, takes residence in the corner office.

Head-on competition, having evolved into a low-cost alternative to our market maker, puts extreme pressure on our company's top decision-makers.

A key hire of our new CEO gets to enjoy the lights of the upper right corner of a national newspaper, after the exposure of his grossly fraudulent resume.

An enterprising U.S. attorney turns his fame-honed focus on our industry.

Some sales numbers noticed in our year-end statements raise questions.

Top management sacked after several quarters of poor performance.

Long-term hiring freeze coupled with key people bailing out.

Wall Street pundits speculating on hostile takeover suitorsor our demiseabsent an "infusion of innovative thinking and related capital."

Decision-Makers Run Amok

What you might recognize is that the exasperating business environment I'm describing contains issues that a CSO can't control, including the fact that management trashed my team's background investigation on a certain executive who's now in the eye of a headlines storm.

You think I'm fabricating this just to publish an article in a magazine? Au contraire. This is my outlet, my alternative to an uncovered psychiatric claim on the medical insurance plan these yahoos just reduced to the same crap-level my son-in-law has at the local tire store.

We've been morphed, gobbled, subsumed and generally made a meal for institutional investors who couldn't care less who we are or what we do. It just seems that my situation here, and this experience, is potentially instructive to everyone going through a management overhaul, or faced with the choice of becoming a former CSO.

Anyway, here I am being summoned into the inner sanctum. It's my first invitation to meet the CEO since he arrived three months ago. This is a place where I previously held forth with a senior management team that claimed truthfulness and fealty to "doing the right thing." Where the hell was I when our company's pledges about business ethics were engraved in acrylic plaques posted on our waiting room wall? I helped write them. But these new guys can't read.