Expand Your Mind: Bad to Great
by Miki Saxon
Bosses; today we’re going to start with the very negative and move forward to the very positive. Have you (or someone you know) ever worked for a boss who you thought was nuts? You might be surprised at how accurate that “diagnosis” actually is.
One out of every 25 company high-flyers is believed to have the mental disorder but disguises it through their high status, charm and manipulation in the workplace.
Speaking of nuts, have you ever read a story where you couldn’t figure out which boss qualified as such?
A businessman at the centre of a £10 million High Court battle involving claims of drunkenness and lewd behavior among senior staff at Microsoft in Britain is the victim of a “boardroom ambush”, according to friends.
What comes between very, very bad and very, very good? It depends on who you ask.
And that brings us to Carol Bartz, who was fired by phone to avoid rumors, AKA board leaks. More interesting is the difference between the email to employees sent by the Board and Bartz’s blunt, honest comments in an exclusive interview; blunt in spite of probably costing her as much as $10 million for violating a non-disparagement clause.
Fortune today published an explosive interview with Carol Bartz, who on Tuesday was fired as Yahoo CEO after 32 months on the job. In it, she referred to her fellow board members as “doofuses,” and said that they “f—ed me over.”
Finally, moving all the way to positive, we have Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who, along with Tony Hsieh at Zappos (which Amazon acquired at Hsieh’s request) are the poster boys of great culture, employee engagement, innovation and profit. This profile from Fast Company is one of the best articles about Bezos that I’ve seen.
Has he been lucky? “Extraordinarily,” he says. It couldn’t have happened without “planetary alignment,” he explains. But luck isn’t all. Bezos’s success also springs from his ideas about running companies and creating innovation. His thinking is farsighted and intuitive. … “It’s one thing to be a data junkie who just looks at history, but Jeff takes a prospective view. He takes risks and he changes and changes.”
Enjoy!
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/
