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Changing a company for the better requires full-on engagement from the leadership, but many of them have difficulty staying in control throughout the process.
Interested in the downfalls, Reddit user Fuzzyloulou made a post on the platform, asking everyone to share the fastest ways CEOs have ruined their organizations.
From construction and logistics to retail and tech, people quickly started listing stories from all sorts of sectors. Since the discussion has already received thousands of them, we decided to save you some valuable time and put together a list of the most memorable and polarizing ones.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Jaguar in recent days: Why pander to an audience who don’t drive and can’t even afford the product?
Onan Hag All 12 months ago
Well said. It's such a shame that they have turned their backs on the very features which made the brand iconic.
RELATED:
#2
Sears paid Amazon to make their website.
Amazon finishes.
Sears execs say it's pointless. Internet is a fad.
They give their blessings to Amazon to use the website.
How's Sears doing?
Child of the Stars 12 months ago
The irony Sears going out of business because it couldn't adapt to online shopping...
Herman Vantrappen, managing director of strategic advisory firm Akordeon, and Frederic Wirtz, who heads The Little Group, advising companies on organization design issues, say that when they've observed leaders' inability to remain fully in control, their weaknesses usually reflect one of four characteristics: half-heartedness, appeasement, indecisiveness, or incapacitation.
#3
Eddie Lampert at Sears. It took him a few years to do it, but he managed to destroy two 100 year old companies. Sears and Kmart.
I am the rat in your walls 12 months ago
kmart here in australia is still one of the top brand :D
#4
Not nearly as high profile as a lot of what was posted here but:
A couple of years back, I works for a small, single product manufacturer who were trying to get approval for it to be used as a medicine.
6 months into my Contract (I was a contractor - this is outside the US) it was surprisingly bought out by a US based mid-sized food manufacturer.
We met our new owners and one of them shook me by the hand telling me how much we’d all be needed over the next years as the bought the product to market.
Next day they terminated my contract as ‘non-essential staff’. On the one hand I was a contractor and s**t like that can happen. One the other, f**k those guys a month before Christmas.
2 months later the site was shut down with the loss of about 60 jobs. Why? Because the idiots had no idea of the regulatory process of bringing an API (Active Pharmaceutical Product) to market.
That was easily $200 million straight down the drain.
BeesEelsAndPups 12 months ago
My first startup was like this. We were offered $20 million to buy us out by a competitor. The owners didn't sell, because we were worth at least 5 times that much. Two years latter we were sold out of bankruptcy for just under $500 thousand. My options were all under water
This year has seen significant changes in CEO turnover. Career transitioning firm challenger, Gray & Christmas, reported that 622 chief executives announced their resignations in the first quarter alone—this represents a 50% increase compared to the first quarter of 2023, which was already a record year for CEO exits.
Some attribute the surge in departures to the evolving business landscape, the retirement of Baby Boomers, and increased pressure on CEOs to navigate complex issues, including inflation, supply chain disruptions, and environmental, social, and governance concerns.
In general, the median tenure of CEOs at S&P 500 companies has been on the decline, falling from six years in 2013 to 4.8 years in 2022, a 20% decrease over the period, according to executive consultancy Equilar.
#5
Last year our new CEO decided prices were too low. He jacked them by about 70% and customers completely stopped buying. The entire sales team (7 people) quit or was fired. I’m told the company expects to close less than 50% of the revenue it did in the previous year. Major blunder.
#6
He tried to run a nonprofit library wholesaler like a car dealership. Because he was a car dealership guy who knew f**k-all about libraries.
Most of the senior staff retired and he fired the rest. Then implemented policies that treated us all like children, such as having to put our phones in a box at the front office when we got into work in the morning. Hired a bunch of rando high level positions who also knew f**k-all about libraries.
Then he talked some s**t about people who ‘couldn’t handle change’ because they’d quit. Refused to allow us to order inventory so libraries couldn’t get extra copies when a book unexpectedly blew up.
Anyway, I quit when I was handed a coworker’s entire job with no extra compensation (or, you know, choice in the matter) and the 60+ year old company was dead within about a year, year and a half of him becoming CEO.
While most boards of directors know what to do when their CEO screws over the company or is accused of illegal activity, things get murkier when we look at questionable actions.
To examine how corporations handle allegations of CEO misbehavior, David Larcker and Brian Tayan conducted an extensive review of news media between 2000 and 2015. They identified 38 incidents where a CEO's behavior garnered a meaningful level of media coverage (defined as more than 10 unique news references) and categorized these incidents as follows:
- 34% involved reports of a CEO lying to the board or shareholders over personal matters, such as a drunk driving offense, undisclosed criminal record, falsification of credentials, or other behavior;
- 21% involved a sexual affair or relations with a subordinate, contractor, or consultant;
- 16% involved CEOs making use of corporate funds in a manner that is questionable but not strictly illegal;
- 16% involved CEOs engaging in objectionable personal behavior or using abusive language;
- 13% involved CEOs making public statements that are offensive to customers or social groups.
#7
How about Chainsaw Al Dunlap. They called him Chainsaw because he’d take over a company and cut it up into pieces. He took over Sunbeam and bankrupted it in an elaborate accounting scandal. He’s on the list of worst CEO’s of all time. Look him up. It’s an interesting read.
Rosecrucian Roeth 12 months ago
Knowing corporate america, he probably has a bunch of opportunities to choose from................
#8
Just saw on the news a Texas logistics company CFO was sentenced to 51 months in prison for wire fraud for transferring company funds to his bank account and destroying the company causing it to shut down and lay everyone off.
The kicker is, he was convicted of the same felony in 1994 so second time he’d done it.
John Dilligaf 12 months ago
sounds like the perfect candidate for a position in the incoming administration
#9
The CEO of Hoover? Decided on a ridiculous giveaway with the purchase of a new vacuum.
They were giving away airline tickets worth more than the price of the vacuum- everyone told him it was going to flop and cost the company millions more than the revenue it would bring in. He stuck to his guns then tried to cancel the whole thing at the last minute.
This was in 1992 in UK and if one spent 200 British pounds of Hoover stuff they would get an airline ticket worth 600 pounds.
John Dilligaf 12 months ago
I remember hearing about this, If I remember correctly they intended for it to be limited to airline flights within Europe. Where plane fairs are dirt cheap. However, they didn't word the Terms & Conditions that way,. As a result people were getting free transatlantic flights.
In 84% of the cases Larcker and Tayan analyzed, the company issued a press release or formal statement on the matter. In 71%, a spokesperson provided direct commentary to the press. Board members were much less likely to speak to the media, making direct comments only 37% of the time.
In over half of cases (55%), the board of directors was known to initiate an independent review or investigation. The board is most likely to announce an independent review in cases of potential financial misconduct, however, the willingness of an individual director to discuss the matter directly with the press does not appear to be associated with the type of behavior involved or the "severity" of the CEO's actions.
#10
That guy at Blockbuster who turned down Netflix's offer.
Huddo's sister 12 months ago (edited)
I understand why you wouldn't want to sell a company that has been your 'baby' though. I remember when I studied visual communication & design in high school. One of the first lessons the teacher said 'don't name your first fashion line after yourself, because it will make it harder for you when you sell it' and I thought, why sell it then? I get that it is good to make money, but if it's doing well enough to get people wanting to buy it, and it's your passion, maybe that's enough. Not that it worked out for Blockbuster of course, but they didn't necessarily know how the future would go. Hindsight is always 20/20.
#11
The most classic example is a guy called Gerald Ratner who was ceo of his family’s jewellery business
The shops and products were popular despite being tacky
He gave a speech in 1991 where he said:
We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total c**p.”
After the speech, the value of the Ratner group plummeted by around £500 million, which very nearly resulted in the group’s collapse.
#12
Bob Chapek’s takeover of Disney in 2019.
He immediately hired finance buddies into creative positions, prioritized making money via their parks, and had a *quantity over quality* approach with their movies. He had a hand green-lighting an insane amount of projects which lead to overworked staff, bad quality production, and as a result: disliked projects and failing entertainment properties (mainly Marvel).
Nicole Weymann 12 months ago
"He's from finance! He knows how to make money!" I feel that whenever finance gets the upper hand quality loses. You start out with a good (while possibly costly) product, have a phase where quality is lost, staff is reduced, and the company lives on past laurels while increasing prices ("Look at the NUMBERS! We're finally hitting GOLD! That's what happens when you lose the déad weight!"), and finally end up with a sh!tty product more expensive than the original one - and lots of and lots of patches and built-up maintenance issues because the remaining skeleton staff has been overworked "for the duration and the good of the company - only for a little time! Keep going!"
#13
He bought Twitter.
No-Comment-00:
Must have been one of the fasted destructions of company value. Insane, sure he and his state actor 'investors' didn't buy it solely for financial gain but also political influence, but I think Elon actually thought his changes were great 'business wise'. Instead he destroyed everything that made twitter so popular and the company profitable.
John Dilligaf 12 months ago
I remain convince that Elon bought Twitter for the reason of destroying it. Twitter had pi$$ed him off, so he bought it and broke it.
#14
Took a job at a tech startup in the 90s with the promise of fast growth and opportunity.
Things really took off in the second year and we opened up several more branches in different states while I was promoted to production manager. The company hired a young CEO who was only a couple of years older than me. Sometimes he would stay at our location for a couple of weeks at a time and he started driving really nice sports cars to work. When he would leave to other cities he would leave his cars in the parking lot of our branch. There were corvettes, porsches, audis, and more.
After the second year of promising growth, the business suddenly stopped while the owners visited and yelled at the entire crew for not managing our money and told us that they were in debt by over a million dollars. We were all given the task of dismantling the equipment and preparing it to be sold and shipped before being let go.
On our last day when the building was empty we all noticed that the row of sports cars was still there and the owner had placed for sale signs on them. It turned out that they were all bought as company vehicles and the CEO had done this at each business location.
We all still were yelled at in a furious rage by this CEO and owner for not being responsible people.
#16
For me, It is Michelle Gass, former CEO of Kohl's.
Before her, Kohls was a fun place to work, everyone got along, sales were booming and black fridays were huge events.
Then she said she didn't want stores to carry large amounts of inventory, which is fair, but they overdid it. There were large empty spaces at most stores and noting in the stock rooms.
Then, came the Amazon deal. Kohls would take in Amazon returns in the hope of increasing sales. They gave every person that returned Amazon items an in-store coupon. However. People who shop Amazon don't care about Kohls. They can get it cheaper on Amazon.
Part of this deal was that Kohls used its distribution system to ship Amazon packages back to amazon.... the sales didn't even make up a part of the expenses.
Amazon, really won that one.
Then, during covid, she cut 90% of the loss prevention staff. Which, you guessed it, resulted in record inventory losses. It wasn't unheard of for 10% inventory losses compared to sales. I had a few stores that hit over a million dollars in lost inventory.
What did they do with the remaining Loss prevention staff? They made them door greeters. Which resulted in people leaving the company.
Then, throughout covid, Kohls was one of those companies that should have profited massively. They had a large distribution chain and online sales. Yet. They closed down store ability for online sales and only used specific stores.
Kohls is now in the beginning stages of becoming Sears.
Upstaged75 12 months ago
I was wondering what happened to Kohls! It used to be great but I stopped shopping there because there was nothing decent anymore.
#17
Segway brought in a new CEO who promptly decimated the stock value when he died riding a Segway off a cliff.
#18
Not CEO but President and especially Vice president of the company.
BIG MOTOR.
President of the company placed his son as vice president and profits skyrocketed, but only because as it turned out, new vice president forced dealerships to commit insurance fraud, regular fraud, abused and humiliated the staff, killed all the plant life around dealership. After it got out, reputation of the company was completely destroyed, despite them being the biggest and most trusted dealership before that.
Lost Panda 12 months ago
Funny story was that the wife and I were in the market for a new(to us) car and were on our way to Big Motor. We turned into the lot we thought was Big Motor, but was actually the dealer beside them that we never noticed before. We got a good deal on the car we wanted, then the next day the news of Big Motor dropped. The gods were looking out for us on that botched turn XD
#19
Randall Stephenson: AT&T
He bought DirectTV and Warner Brothers (including DC Comics, CNN, HBO and so on) for only $175B dollars between 2015 and 2018. When everyone was moving to stream services, he thought it was a good idea to buy a cable company that was losing customers by millions and a struggling media company.
Me and thousands of people lost their job because of it. Including Randall, with a $64 million retirement package.
#20
The guy that ran a lottery on a live stream, then didn't give the winner a PC because he said she had too few subscribes.
ShawnyMcKnight:
Had to look up the company; Artesian Builds.
It’s crazy how in a promotion to improve your reach you absolutely destroyed it. If they set the rules up front that you had to have X number of subscribers no one would care, it makes sense. They want people with influence to use their product. Crazy how badly they shot themselves in the foot.
Glasofruix 12 months ago
And by they you mean the idiot CEO. He had a profitable business, two locations and he blew everything because he needed to stroke his own ego on live stream.
#21
A construction company near me was pulling $100-$200 million in revenue every year and growing constantly, then the owner died and his fratbro failson was handed the reins.
Within a month a quarter the employees had either been fired or quit. After four months the rental companies were showing up and repoing lifts and cranes/carrydecks in the middle of the day because they weren't being paid. Almost 3/4ths of the employees had quit by this point because paychecks kept bouncing. Before six months had passed, what was left was sold for a pittance to another company that just wanted what was left of the maintenance contracts.
So like six months to bomb the company he'd been groomed to take over since he was a teenager to rubble and p**s on the ashes.
#22
There was the whole Walgreens theranos debacle. Fun fact: the ceo who basically ruined Walgreens became the CEO of Joann Fabrics and basically drove them into bankruptcy too.
Geoffrey Scott 12 months ago
I had NO idea Rite Aid (RIP) was a sub of Walgreens. Odd you would try to cannibalize your own customer base. Waiting to see if the Dollar stores suffer the same fate. Explosive growth, one in every small town.
#23
A CIO came in and started his tenure off with telling everyone his second week there on a Friday that starting Monday, there was absolutely no wfh. Nada. Zilch. No excuses. HR got involved and made it even clearer.
This was before Covid and it was wfh 3 days/week. Some people had moved 2+ hours away, would come in to town Monday morning, stay the night, work Tuesday, and go home to work until the next Monday.
Well in IT it’s not very prudent to not have your guys be able to hop on to fix a problem. So the CIO would try to make the exemption in special cases and no one would budge. So the few times some people went in, a 10m fix would run them 3-4 hours.
This CIO also had a knack of yelling at people in public and just being a huge dumbfuck and not knowledgeable about anything. He took a 15 year secretary and made her an enterprise backend developer… that she never wanted. He took an amazing developer and assigned them to 1 of 58 sites for a pet project where we could start pulling data without the site’s permission. The site told them to f**k off when they realized what was going on after a few months. The thinly spread developer led to a site getting hacked and held for ransom, literally.
And that’s just before I left. In 2 years the place had a 50%+ turnover. The old timers who wrote the old a*s code keeping the place running took early retirement. Middle careers like myself f****d off. Everyone else was just new looking for experience or holding on for early retirement. The place cratered.
From some colleagues who stayed I heard people were often crying in the hallways. They had to hire a moral boosting position that did jack s**t. Federal requirements were falling through left and right and the agency was getting sanctioned repeatedly.
Eventually the board wiped out the entire top brass of about 10 people (in a 200 person agency). But the damage was done and to this day s**t still hasn’t recovered. I know people who took 40k pay cuts for other jobs just to get tf out of that place.
#24
My personal experience was a new manager that stopped all overtime. I was trying to keep customers happy and he was not for it. The overtime is an indication that we needed more people. He couldn't see it. I left and they folded.
Nicole Weymann 12 months ago
"We need either more people or more time!" - "Naw, both takes money. We don't want that! Need to improve our balances!" Dude, your managing of balances is losing you quality and in the end costing you more than it gains you, because customers will LEAVE. But of course that's not management's concern, beause they'll leave for greener pastures after a stint of "streamlining" the company and producing hollowed ruins.
#25
He fired the guy who owned almost all the patents to the products the company produced.
#26
Good old "Big Jim"
Came in on the promise to shareholders he would double the profits in less than a year. And that he did.
First: Forced "retirements" for anyone there over 15 years. Get rid of those high salaries. ( and institutionalized knowledge, but who cares about that)
Second: Cancel all capital projects. Why build out when customers are kinda forced to buy from us anyway?
Third: RTO all around! Even said in a teams meeting ( from his comfy home office of course) "If you don't like it, leave."
35% of us left. Company is barely hanging on and it's well known they are positioning themselves to get sold.
Kelly Scott 12 months ago
Sounds like Kinkos shooting themselves in the foot until they were bought out by FedEx.
#27
When the CEO of EA moved to being the CEO of Unity, and then immediately shoot himself in the foot with a 12 gauge by changing Unity's publishing policies and causing most devs to drop the engine if he wasn't fired.
#28
Not a CEO situation but a district manager losing about 30 years worth of sales experience over a 1 month period.
Worked at a cell phone store, we were in a great mall and were the best in the district. The worst location was in a perceivably better mall.
The district manager decided that he was going to transfer the entire staff between the two malls. As if it wasn't the people that were the problem at the s****y location. Several of us objected to this move and we were told and I quote "if I tell you to jump, you will say how high"
One guy walked out on the spot leaving with 5 years experience. Within 3 days of the move our best guy quit the company, 8 years of experience gone. A week later I quit taking my 6 years of experience with me. About another week later the last remaining guy and the manager both quit the same day for a total of 11 years more experience.
Our original store predictably tanked and became the worst store. The "better" mall's store remained empty for a few months.
About 6 months after I passed my original store and it had closed down. I don't know if they relocated but it was no longer there. It was one of those generic we sell every carrier company.
#29
GoBear in Asia. The company got funded 200M euro in 5 years. Best funded company in SE Asia at the time. Got a new CEO who fired every single ~~board member~~ member of the executive team that didn't agree with him. Kept all the yessir C-level and directors. In two years, the company went down the drain and closed. At its peak, it had over 200 employees.
The best part of it, he made the company buy a money-lending business in the Philippines... that he owned. So he pocketed whatever money the company had left and then shut it down.
#30
Kennedy at Lucasfilm. Only took a few years time to turn a guaranteed cash cow into a struggling brand.
Luke Branwen 12 months ago
Kennedy is behind projects like the OG Jurassic Park... would you call that a fail? In fact, she's just a scapegoat for losers who are mad because their comfort media no longer pander to them and them only and a woman is a perfect target for their hate. And also, calling Star Wars "struggling" is also kinda delusional.
#32
First Republic Bank. The CEO / founder had no succession plan, because he planned to live forever. He also planned that the interest rates would be low forever (not reality) and assumed massive but unnecessary duration risk for the bank portfolio, believing there would never be a rainy day. Well, a rainy day came, and the bank to the wealthy collapsed; 30+ years down the tubes in a week. Ego is a killer.
#33
David Zaslav and Discovery Channel buying WarnerMedia.
Canceled highly anticipated movies already made, watered down HBO Max with cheap Discovery trash, and instituted RTO and fired anyone who couldn’t.
Carl Roberts 12 months ago (edited)
They also cancelled all first-run tv series on TBS and TNT. Leaving "American Dad" as the only remaining scripted show on either network. As for HBO Max (now known as simply "Max"), 100% agree. They also added ads to what was an ad-free platform. And they wonder why people are cancelling subscriptions.
#34
Adding a large fleet of Teslas to Hertz rental except not having the actual infrastructure or education to keep vehicles charged or clean.
Richard Graham 12 months ago
Now Hertz can't sell them - would you buy an abused electric car?
#35
Not a CEO, but working in a small female dominated business, the new owner decided he was canceling the flexible contracts that allowed people wiggle to for school drop off/kids sick days and the like. The company had to shut for 2 weeks after the majority of the staff swapped to a competing buisness in the next suburb. Place never really picked up again after the word got around town. One of the ladies put in a good word for me a few months later and an offer sign a substantial pay increase and better conditions appeared in my inbox.
#36
Probably when a ceo comes in and tries to “cut costs” by laying off the people who actually know how to run the business. like, they save money short term but lose all the talent and experience, and the whole thing falls apart. also, when they make some wild pivot into a market they don’t understand—instant disaster.
Michael Largey 12 months ago
CEO do this when they assume everyone knows as little as they do.
#37
The CEO of circuit City eliminating commissions for sales people, expanding to car sales, completely forgetting about their core customers.
#38
Company in the early nineties was a moderately successful manufacturer of network equipment for Macs. Not nearly as big as the dominant player in the market, but doing a respectable business and growing. CEO buys an HP 95LX, an early "Personal Information Manager" (or gets one for Christmas?) and decides to pivot the company to write software to synchronize the calendar and contacts stored on this thing with the Mac. So, he bet the company on a niche product for early adopters on the also-ran (though admittedly superior) operating system. So a market size of maybe 1,000 consumers in 1991? And a price of like $99 a pop? Genius move.
Last I heard, he fled to Hong Kong with the IRS on his tail.
#39
Outsourcing IT for theoretical savings on paper. I've seen it tank profits in major companies a half dozen times personally. I don't think any of them actually went under but it was a big hit almost every time.
Geoffrey Scott 12 months ago
"Big 3" auto companies outsourcing engineering, same deal. Have the die designed onshore, glitch occurs, quick resolution. Offshore, add weeks shipping time to that.
#40
The 343 Industries CEO turning Halo from one of the most beloved franchises in the world to a B tier laughingstock.
Carl Roberts 12 months ago (edited)
Speaking of game companies, currently watching the collapse of Ubisoft in real time is a sight to behold
#41
My dad worked for a smaller family owned company, but they did very well.
Before 2008 my dad tried to warn his childhood best friend (the new CEO) that the market wasn’t looking great, and that he needed to chill out on all the cocaine and hookers or he was going to end up losing everything.
He got offended and fired my dad, then months later he ended up losing the company.
He had blown excessive amounts of money on d***s, quit caring about much of anything, and then when the economy collapsed he was not prepared so he lost the entire company, and ended up getting sued for a lot of money.
#42
I worked for a luxury furniture e-commerce company that went through three CEO's in four years. The first two had a healthy respect and understanding of the role of *forehead smack* *technology in an e-commerce business*. The last one did not. I heard him multiple times saying "man, this tech makes the business so *complicated*. Remember when we could just write and order on paper and it would get done?"
He went to the manufacturers of our furniture and cut corners in ways that reduced the quality, then he laid off 75%f the US staff and contracted the customer service to Colombia for a quarter of the cost. Shipping times tripled. Damage on delivery skyrocketed. I tried explaining that we needed to maintain our investment in tech to grow, but that was seen as dissent and I eventually was let go.
Company went from doing $6 million a month in revenue to less than $1 million. Black Friday/Cyber Monday my first year there we did almost $8 million in revenue. BFCM'24 they did $760,000. I suspect they'll shutter within a year.
#43
I've seen CEOs ruin companies by chasing quick profits and ignoring employee needs and customer feedback. Cutting R&D and making impulsive decisions only creates chaos and kills long-term success.
#44
New CEO was told to cut costs, and commenced the most aggressive cost cutting program ever seen in our company's history. So much so we started haemorrhaging revenue, which lead him to cut costs even more aggressively.
In the space of 2 years we’d lost a heap of market share, we went from being a very profitable company to one with a sharp drop in ROE, and by the time he was fired (for doing his business manager in his office), the business needed substantial investment to bring all its systems back up to standard and hire good staff again. Market share never recovered, and the business is still worse off than when he started a decade ago.
#45
Research in Motion actually had a copy of the iPhone almost a year before its release. They thought it was hilarious. Like it had so much functionality to it that it'd burn through all of its data in like.... an hour. Their phones on the other hand were slim and managed data much better.
What they didn't know was that AT&T was secretly building the world's largest and most powerful data network specifically for being the exclusive provider of this phone.
#46
I worked for Kmart when Chuck Conoway became CEO. He was obsessed with beating Walmart and drove Kmart to a bankruptcy (in about 2 years) trying to do it.
#47
A competitors business which is nation wide did profit sharing. 50% of profits went back to he employees, 40% to manager of a location, and 10% split between everyone else. Some managers cracking $400k/yr!!
Anyway the founder of the company died and the son took over and took away profit sharing. A lot of their talent left, and you can clearly see it in their Google reviews. A lot of their locations average 4.5 stars, now most are under 4 stars, parking lots no where near as full, and managers that just don't care to pump up the numbers.
Imagine making $150-400k, and dropping to $75k with MAYBE a 10k manager bonus if you hit your target.
René Sauer 12 months ago
why would the manager alone get 40% of the shared profit? If anything it should have been like 25% for the manager, 25% for the employees.
#48
Restaurant in the neighborhood I grew up in changed owners. The new guy came in and during his ribbon cutting made a joke about Irish people being stupid. The restaurant was located in a neighborhood that’s like 97% Irish. lol.
Michael Largey 12 months ago
We Irish are so stupid that sometimes we can't even find our way back to a restaurant we've gone to for years.
#49
As a photographer who started at the peak of Flickr, F**K Marissa Mayer. She destroyed flickr.
#50
The case of sneaker villa and the Manchurian COO
Any of you sneaker heads would know that villa “disappeared” but you may not know why.
Our ceo was very cool, but a bit naive and had to let the investors have this stern school of business coo. The guy did nothing but make enemies.
The Ferguson shootings had happened. Our company employees were very upset . We flew them all out to Philadelphia convention center.
Our ceo gives a conciliatory speech, everyone claps. People are feeling better. The COO says “thanks Jason, I just want everyone to know in this room that more white people are killed by the police each year than black people”
I thought he was going to be killed. They found pictures of him having an affair, it got real racial real
Quick and Goode partners wanted out. We were sold for 1/3 of what we should have been.
I truly believe the COO was a
Manchurian executive. The guy wiped out 200 million off the table. F**k you dave!
#51
JC Penny.
Tired of fake sales where a $100 jacket was marked up to $200 for a few weeks, and then put "on sale", the new CEO decided to put an end to it. No more fake sales. No more b******t discounts. Here's a good product, for a reasonable price, with a small markup that makes sense.
They went out of business within a year, because people don't want a $100 jacket for $100. They want a $200 jacket for $100, even when they know it's fake.
#52
My dad spent 35 years starting and building his business. Hugely profitable by the end and a place people wanted to work. He wanted to retire, so he sold it. Within 3 months almost everyone had left because they were being treated like c**p to maximize profits. 6 months in, during the peak season when my dad would normally have to turn away work, they had employees without work to do. 1 year from purchase and they closed the business. I couldn't believe how quickly it could collapse.
#53
Not me but a friend of mine is a f*****g corporate management wizard. To the point that he is hired to tell companies how to fix their s**t. Most of his clients go bankrupt or get sold off for pennies within 2 years of his contract end because they either refuse to make the changes he lays out, or they hire someone to run the company after making all the changes and their new management axes all of it for a "lean" system.
Effectively he recommends to take most of the profit margin and divide it into employee retention/hiring and reinvestment for equipment replacement/upgrades/facility improvements/expansion and generally at a 50:50 ratio. But there are specifics as to how to maximize it and that's where the wizard part comes in. Any and every company that actually followed his plan and stuck with it succeeded, which is why he is always in demand.
The problem is most, and by most I mean something like 80% of the companies, don't.
Cue one such company. Old man who had built the entire operation dies, kids can't be assed to run it because they have more important things to do, so they hire my friend to tell them how to turn it into an intaglio press. He goes through everything, spends something like 6 months on it, and gives them a detailed plan. Detailed down to who to hire to run it for them. They nod their empty heads and promptly hire one of their friends from high school to be CEO, new CEO tells him his report is "f*****g nonsense" and tries to refuse the final payment for the contract they had with my friend. 4 months later it was dissolved.
Less than a year after that guy's death, the company he spent his life building did not exist.
But my friend did get his last payment from the bankruptcy court. And the CEO got caught drunk, with an underage prostitute, at a DUI checkpoint shortly after.
#54
There's a locally owned greenhouse / orchard business in my town that had been around for 105 years. The owner handed the business over to his son who then proceeded to hire some skank, started sleeping with her, and then put her in charge of the day-to-day operations, which caused a bunch of the workers to quit. Then he was arrested six times in a three year span for DUI / resisting arrest / damage to private property / failure to appear.
Shortly thereafter the place was gutted and sold. His parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had built the business up for over a century, and he completely destroyed it within a couple years.
#55
The CEO of Sonos is doing quite well.
Introducing headphones that required a software update that made thousands of loyal customers systems unusable purely to sell a few pairs of headphones which was never going to be as lucrative as selling multiple speaker systems.
Some long term customers totally abandoned the company.
#56
Dan Ustian, Navistar - 2004 - 2012. Thought his engineers could defy the laws of physics, fired anyone who told him he was wrong. Never put a bean counter in charge of an engineering or technology company. They will kill it. (See Boeing).
#57
CIO came in, and within six months, 50% of IT quit! He was so toxic and had no clue WTF he was doing. It got so bad that HR set up a desk on our floor to figure out what was happening. Eighteen months after I quit, the company went out of business.
#58
For a more serious example, there's the whole thing with US Firearms Company and the ZiP 22. US Firearms Company was a relatively small gun manufacturer. They were certainly never on the same scale as the likes of Colt or FN, but they were reasonably successful, and did find a niche for making what were and still are considered very high quality reproductions of the Colt Single Action Army revolver. And then for some inexplicable reason, the CEO decided to toss it all away in favor of his brainchild, the ZiP 22, a pistol that is generally considered to be one of the worst firearms ever made. Not only is it an extremely unreliable gun that's extremely prone to jamming, even if the thing works perfectly, the ZiP 22 is extremely awkward to hold from an ergonomics perspective, and on top of that, it's also one of the most blatantly unsafe firearms ever made, since cocking the gun requires the user to place their finger *directly in front of the barrel.*
The ZiP 22 was such an absolute disaster of a firearm that just a year after it had been released, the company was forced to shut down in it's entirety.
Iain “Strachan” Strachan 12 months ago
Heard about this.. To make it worse he sold all of the tooling ,jigs and machinery they used to make the Single action armys. So they couldn't go back to making the single actions again after the Zip .22 fiasco..
#59
Taking the profits from one business unit and continuously funnelling more money and resources into the other unit who, years later, still weren't profitable. Also RIF'ing out top performers from the profit unit. The board finally caught on and that CEO was exited but not before death spiralling the entire company.
#60
I'll have to be vague but a startup I worked for had some initial success and profit and the CEO responded by deciding to go and "disrupt" more industries and invest all of our profits into that, while diverting resources from our thing that actually made money. We were spread thin and failed.
#61
It's called the Osborne effect. Once the owner of hugely successful computer company, Adam Osborne announced a new computer before it could be shipped.
According to proponents of the Osborne effect theory, Adam Osborne damaged his company's current sales when he began showing the Osborne Executive to journalists in early 1983. Dealers rapidly started cancelling orders for the Osborne 1 in anticipation of the new Executive. Unsold inventory piled up and in spite of dramatic price cuts – the Osborne 1 was selling for $1295 in July 1983 and $995 by August – sales did not recover. Losses, already higher than expected, continued to mount, and OCC declared bankruptcy on September 13, 1983.
#64
There was an auto-supplier that dated back to the 1800s called Federal-Mogul. In the late 90s the CEO at the time made two small acquisitions. It just so happened that those two small companies ended up having some asbestos liabilities. Even though they eventually resold those businesses, the liabilities stuck to Federal-Mogul, and they were bankrupted by it in 2001.
#65
Leo Apotheker drove HP and Palm into the ground within six months of his takeover.
I'm still bitter. WebOS was better than iOS and Android and it wasn't particularly close. If I ever find myself near that man it is *on sight.*.
#66
My previous job, the dad stepped down, son took over. Made massive profits in lockdown. Built a new factory with all the profits. Lost his major contracts as he flooded the market during the pandemic, nobody needs 1000000 ventilators today, gave half the staff redundancy,cut overtime so the actual workers quit, I heard it's closing down in January. 145 year old business, killed in 4 years.
Rali Meyer 12 months ago
And always something else to blame. Like a natural disaster 10.000 mls away.
#67
Decided that owning a live music venue would be more exciting than a fastener company.
That's not how he presented it, however. He was going to move them to just-in-time manufacturing to reduce their reliance on expensive warehousing! The fact that the company warehouse was going to be redeveloped into a 'state of the art music experience' was just 'his way of giving back to the community'.
Labor costs doubled and the sales department went from "You can have them this afternoon if you send someone over, otherwise we'll deliver in the morning" to "Sorry, it'll be 30 days, and there's a minimum order of 50K."
They went bankrupt inside of nine months.
Karmic justice was sweet though.. His first partner in the music venue fled the country with a pile of stolen cash from investors, when he submitted for planning permission the NIMBYs came out of the woodwork, and his second partner put the nails in the coffin when he decided to go ahead and 'spruce the place up and do a soft open' by tearing out a s**t-ton of asbestos and holding an illegal rave where two kids overdosed.
#68
I watched the owner of a place I work at turn a big facility that was designed and layed out to service many clients (3rd party logistics) turn the entire building into 1 client. I expressed my concerns about this as if that client ever pulls out there will be 0 work and everyone will be let go.
Fast forward 1.5 years later and that client pulled out, everyone was laid off and I was the last one standing.
The company is now gone. This is what happens when you hire family members that have no clue what they're doing, have no business background and put them into the highest positions.
#70
Hasbro has been doing everything in its power to destroy the Dungeon and Dragon brand.
#71
Flew around the country making sales and collecting his quarterly bonuses. Turns out that in a year he hadn’t made a single sale. Worse, the engineer ps thought we had a product that customers wanted.
#72
That whole bud light deal didn't go over too well.
Tropical Tarot 12 months ago
It wasn't a deal. They made one special can for Dylan Mulvaney. Then she made ONE tiktok about it and that was it. No huge financing deal. Talk about a tempest in a teapot!!
#73
I ran a very successful sales department back in the 90s. My big boss let his son, who had run 2 offices into the ground, come into the company to work. He targeted my space, he bullied me, he belittled me, and I was told…bad luck..you have to suck it up..he was the Harvey Weinstein of my era..he changed the course of my life..I really hope there is such a thing as karma….
#74
[digg.com](http://digg.com)
digg was far superior to reddit in the early days. reddit was primitive, small user base, dull content. In fact, reddit may not have even *existed* during the early digg days. digg had the early "web 2.0" feel, bigger user base, better content -- it was just a better site. digg had its problems, like power users influencing content popularity, but the site was on track to be a behemoth, the way reddit and other huge socials are today.
In 2010 digg released a new version of the site where they completely changed how it works, for the worse. You can read up on it on [wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg) The revamp completely ruined the site, and it has never recovered. I can say with some confidence that many reddit users never would have made accounts here if not for the downfall of digg. I believe reddit would be a shadow of its current popularity if digg just kept doing what they were doing, of course with continual improvements along the way (like decreasing the impact of power users).
#75
Must of been a ceo but who ever dropped the bag on yahoo back in the day. liked the email and messenger and the spell checker was the best even to this day. I almost feel like android is gaslighting you with their keyboard and spell checker these days. Yahoo knew what word you wanted or would just highlight them. Go back through and click them and the correct word was usually the first option now. These days I've had to Google a word for spelling because the checker is c**p even just a letter or 2 off.
#76
Whoever decided no p*rn on tumblr.
Want it or not tumblr was a center point for artists of all kinds, and lots would do kinky stuff.
And when they went for it they went hard. like a bot would go through and ban you if it found something a little too sexy.
Traffic on tumblr dropped by like 50% in a month.
Carl Roberts 12 months ago
OP left out the part where most of the p-o-r-n on tumblr was illegal (as in, the revenge and underage variety)
#77
CEO of HP buyout Compaq and erase a great name and great product from history to gain market share.
#78
Jeff Immelt turned GE from a widows and orphans stock to a widowed stock.
#79
Broadcom CEO's decision to aquire Vmware has pretty much gutted that company.
Bartlet for world domination 12 months ago (edited)
Broadcom is fine, it's the Vmware customers that are fսcked.
#80
Jonathan Schwartz pretty much doomed Sin Microsystems the day he took the reins.
#81
Tech company which had been around for years selling modems and rudimentary networking gear for use with mainframes and minicomputers. The PC was born and the market was growing rapidly, albeit at lower price points. Then the Internet happened and demand went crazy.
The company had had a simple sales model of direct sales and select resellers. It needed to transition to more consumer distribution models. CEO announced a change, the entire salesforce quit, sales dropped 50% in one quarter and they were done.
What do you think ?
Tucker Cahooter 12 months ago
The CEO of Bunnings, the major hardware chain in Australia. They bought out Homebase in the UK, sacked all the existing management staff, and brought in Australians who clearly had zero understanding of the differences between the UK and Australian home improvement market. They ended up having to sell it for a token sum of 1 pound having paid hundreds of millions for it. The thing is that they had watched one of their major competitors crash and burn in Australia for trying to impose an American model onto an Australian operation, so clearly they didn't heed those lessons either
Seán Baron 12 months ago
I remember this happening. Homebase is somehow still limping on.
Load More Replies...
Will Cable 12 months ago
Always amazed at those who destroy these companies always find top jobs at other companies.
firecrackershrimp 12 months ago
And walk away with $illion dollar exit packages.
Load More Replies... Carl Roberts 12 months ago (edited)
Hellofresh needs to be on here. They just got caught using undocumented migrant child laborers at their main packing warehouse. I see them either closing down, or being sold to a competitor as a result.
Nils Skirnir 12 months ago
Boeing. Due to misguided focus on cost reductions, running commercial like govt contractor, firing folks over 50, offshoring IT to a company w/no aerospace expertise, etc, etc has become a basket case. Not only has commercial biz had trouble, but, space and military too.
Oskar vanZandt 12 months ago
All these examples just support the notion that there are A LOT of psychopaths in positions of power...
ZGutr 12 months ago
Years ago we got a new CEO. Got announced with lots of noise he was one of the best a company could get. Took me a week to find out he would destroy the company and I left. Why? The a$shole would NEVER took a business decision that would not lead to business for any company owned by his friends (and vice versa). 18 months later he left, 2 months later the company filed bankruptcy.
Matthew Currie 12 months ago
One candidate often forgotten, I think, is Ross Bicycles. A long standing maker of American bikes, they made some decent 10-speeds in the 70's, and got on the MTB bandwagon early, and began making premium quality bikes, but there was more money, apparently, in making office furniture and ammo boxes for the government, so they dedicated their US plants to that, and moved their bicycle work to Taiwanese subcontractors, too late to get the kind of good deal Specialized and the like had. The government work ended up going bad, they tried to save money by using cheap parts on the bikes, etc. Once leaders in the MTB market, with their own racing team. A later buyer of the brand did even worse. The name is still around, I think, but the Ross of old, once a competitor to Schwinn, is long gone.
TotallyNOTAFox 12 months ago (edited)
I'm surprised Ubisoft isn't on the list since their CEO effed up on cosmic levels with stupid decisions and statements
Tucker Cahooter 12 months ago
The CEO of Bunnings, the major hardware chain in Australia. They bought out Homebase in the UK, sacked all the existing management staff, and brought in Australians who clearly had zero understanding of the differences between the UK and Australian home improvement market. They ended up having to sell it for a token sum of 1 pound having paid hundreds of millions for it. The thing is that they had watched one of their major competitors crash and burn in Australia for trying to impose an American model onto an Australian operation, so clearly they didn't heed those lessons either
Seán Baron 12 months ago
I remember this happening. Homebase is somehow still limping on.
Load More Replies... Will Cable 12 months ago
Always amazed at those who destroy these companies always find top jobs at other companies.
firecrackershrimp 12 months ago
And walk away with $illion dollar exit packages.
Load More Replies... Carl Roberts 12 months ago (edited)
Hellofresh needs to be on here. They just got caught using undocumented migrant child laborers at their main packing warehouse. I see them either closing down, or being sold to a competitor as a result.
Nils Skirnir 12 months ago
Boeing. Due to misguided focus on cost reductions, running commercial like govt contractor, firing folks over 50, offshoring IT to a company w/no aerospace expertise, etc, etc has become a basket case. Not only has commercial biz had trouble, but, space and military too.
Oskar vanZandt 12 months ago
All these examples just support the notion that there are A LOT of psychopaths in positions of power...
ZGutr 12 months ago
Years ago we got a new CEO. Got announced with lots of noise he was one of the best a company could get. Took me a week to find out he would destroy the company and I left. Why? The a$shole would NEVER took a business decision that would not lead to business for any company owned by his friends (and vice versa). 18 months later he left, 2 months later the company filed bankruptcy.
Matthew Currie 12 months ago
One candidate often forgotten, I think, is Ross Bicycles. A long standing maker of American bikes, they made some decent 10-speeds in the 70's, and got on the MTB bandwagon early, and began making premium quality bikes, but there was more money, apparently, in making office furniture and ammo boxes for the government, so they dedicated their US plants to that, and moved their bicycle work to Taiwanese subcontractors, too late to get the kind of good deal Specialized and the like had. The government work ended up going bad, they tried to save money by using cheap parts on the bikes, etc. Once leaders in the MTB market, with their own racing team. A later buyer of the brand did even worse. The name is still around, I think, but the Ross of old, once a competitor to Schwinn, is long gone.
TotallyNOTAFox 12 months ago (edited)
I'm surprised Ubisoft isn't on the list since their CEO effed up on cosmic levels with stupid decisions and statements
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