Customer Reviews

It Takes a CEO: It's Time to Lead with Integrity

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I don't know much about Hindery's background and how successful he has been as a CEO, but I really enjoyed reading this book. The three main topics seem to be: 1. CEOs should become CEOs for the right reasons, i.e. helping all stakeholders become successful and happy, instead of worrying only about their own highly-inflated income, benefits and bonuses; 2. Shareholders should not be the only people who are considered in the running of a company -- employees, the community and customers should also be considered; 3. Deregulation of certain industries (e.g. media, transport, utilities etc.) has been bad for the country and those industries as a whole; 4. companies (and the national economy) will be better and stronger if employees are paid decent wages and have decent benefits instead of huge bonuses being given to the already mega-wealthy.

Personally, I found it hard to put this book down, as it touched upon so many issues I have thought about in the past few years, especially when I see one my own bosses yearning to become one of the megawealthy fatcats he obviously admires so much. He would obviously be in the job for the wrong reason.

A call for ethics and strong leadership from an insider: Hindery has been CEO of several major cable and Internet companies, including AT&T Broadband. He's also been actively involved in social justice work in both the Catholic community and as a supporter of equal treatment for gays/lesbians and AIDS research, among other causes.

Interestingly, his corporate insider stance is in many ways quite similar to my solopreneur's perspective. He's quick, for instance, to point out the high cost of corporate decisions made on bad moral choices, citing a $2.65 *billion* payout by Citigroup to compensate WorldCom investors who got taken based on one of its analysts' fraudulent advice.

Likewise, on issues ranging from the role of tax cut policy (to stimulate economic development among the have-nots rather than the already super-rich) and the disgrace of CEO compensation all out of proportion to ROI--or what folks make at the bottom of the corporate ladder--I find myself in basic agreement. He doesn't understand why average worker pay climbed only 15 percent from 1980 to 2001, while CEO pay mushroomed 600 percent, and he notes that Disney would have actually shown a greater return if it had taken CEO Michael Eisner 's pay and put it into treasury bonds. Forcing companies to expense stock options, as Microsoft does voluntarily, is one part of his prescription to fix the broken CEO compensation system.

And he points out, as I so often do, that corporate scandals have a real human cost. The Enron retiree who expected to live on a $700,000 nest egg and was left with only $20,418 is one face on that human cost.

Hindery also notes that stockholders aren't the only stakeholders, and decisions should take into account the effect on five major classes: shareholders, of course, but also employees, customers, community (both broadly and narrowly defined), and industry. To that list, I'd add future generations. As an example of this big picture thinking, consider the French government's decision to subsidize a shipyard rather than let it close, recognizing that the economic costs of government assistance to laid-off workers and the social costs of their unemployment, not to mention the loss of a key industrial capability, were going to cost more than the subsidy. He's got plenty of examples from the business side, a well.

Can a company be socially responsible and still compete economically? Hinder contrasts Wal-Mart's rapacious policies with Costco's much more responsible approach, and discovers that the performance numbers wildly favor Costco.

There's more--a lot more--but you'll just have to read the book.

Shel Horowitz's award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, demonstrates how to build a business around ethics, environmental sustainability, and cooperative practices--and how to develop marketing that highlights those advantages.

While the condition of the U.S. economy, and the lack of a manufacturing base in the U.S. are not 100% the responsibility of the CEO, I do agree with the author. Rather than point out his mistakes, as one reviewer successfully didm, I would call on all of us to look at the condition of our economy, our government, and even our world, and do something about it. Do anything. These are all problems that can be solved by one person alone. But if a group of high-profile CEOs decided to forego the instant millions of dollars, truly look long-term, and challenge all other CEO, and Boards of Directors to do the same, there may well be a chance.

It seems that while criticizing renegade CEO's at Enron and the like, the author has not chosen to discuss his own roles in the major disasters linked to two of his own companies - TCI which became AT&T Broadband, which cost AT&T so much money trying to accomplish broadband delivery over cable that it was severely damaged financially and finally sold out to get out from under.
His next role was at GlobalCenter, which was sold to Exodus Communications for $6 billion in stock, in a deal which not only finally brought down Exodus, but also precipitated the fall of GlobalCenter's seller Global Crossing. Certainly a frank examination about what went wrong in those deals would be much more interesting reading than his examinations of the problems of others - and it might better explain why he understands that it is time to lead with integrity.

Any reader should keep this context in mine.