By: Jerry Burke
Now, let's say we're all shareholders in a company. We'll call it America Inc., and for the heck of it, let's say it makes, um, lunchboxes. Four years ago, we shareholders met to choose a new CEO. Although the vice president of the company received quite a few more votes than the son of a former CEO, the corporation's powers that be went with the legacy candidate.
His resume was dubious: a C-student who got into Yale thanks to legacy affirmative action. His first company, an oil venture in Texas, couldn't find oil in Texas. The company went belly up, but not before he managed to sell off all his shares at inflated values.
He then went on to become part owner of a baseball team. His $606,000 investment increased 25-fold when he sold the team 10 years later, thanks primarily to a $200 million taxpayer-financed stadium deal. His most memorable accomplishment during this period of his life was trading away a future 500-home-run hitter for an above-average DH and a utility infielder.
He was made CEO of a smaller company, one we'll call Texas Corp., in 1994. During his time there, he dragged the company into debt to the tune of a billion dollars in borrowed money and was cited by environmentalists as responsible for making his workplace the most polluted in the nation.
So, here we are four years into our incumbent CEO's tenure. In those four years, the company has slashed about a million jobs, turned a healthy profit margin into a multi-billion-dollar deficit and raided the pension fund.
Our CEO's explanation? It wasn't his fault. He says the company's fortunes were changing because of the previous CEO's mistakes, although the company continued to grow well into the first quarter of the new regime. He also blames the trouble on a nasty attempted corporate takeover by the rival Al Qaeda Group -- a raid he was warned about during a month-long vacation only weeks before it happened.
After a swift reprisal directed at Al Qaeda's overseas headquarters, the CEO and our board of directors turned their sights on another company, Iraq Ltd. They offered dubious proof that Iraq Ltd. was planning to release a new line of lunchboxes that would destroy America Inc., even as most of the business community tried to tell them that Iraq Ltd. was a toothbrush company.
Our CEO would have none of that. Valuable resources were poured into a successful hostile takeover. When the dust cleared, all the America Inc. auditors found was cases of toothbrushes. Not a lunchbox in sight. And now the laid-off employees of Iraq Ltd. are as angry as heck over losing their jobs. The Al Qaeda Group, meanwhile, is reorganizing, stronger than ever, in smaller franchises scattered across the globe.
The next shareholders' meeting convenes the first Tuesday in November. The referendum: Have the company continue on its present course, or try a CEO with a clean slate and some imaginative ideas for a turnaround.
If the business of America is truly business, our decision shouldn't be difficult, should it?
Comments? JBurke@liherald.com or 569-400 ext. 234.
