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The Least Productive People in the World

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Gerald Levin Time-Warner

Levin's failure comes down to one colossal mistake: In his desperate eagerness to become a new-media CEO, he orchestrated a megamerger between Time Warner and a vastly overvalued AOL--one of the worst acquisition deals ever. "He had the largest midlife crisis in the history of American capitalism," one of our panelists quipped.

THE STAT: The AOL deal destroyed over $200 billion in Time Warner shareholder value.

Martin Sullivan American International Group

This is the guy who approved those "retention" bonuses that AIG tried to pay after sucking up nearly $200 billion from U.S. taxpayers. Sullivan was ousted before the bailout, but his inaction as CEO helped create AIG's mess. He brushed off the firm's subprime exposure as "manageable" while writedowns mounted and the firm recorded its two largest-ever quarterly losses.

THE STAT: Sullivan's severance package was $25.4 million, including $322,000 for private use of corporate aircraft.

John Sculley Apple Corp.

Sculley forced Steve Jobs out of Apple. Enough said. But let's continue: Though he was a brilliant marketer at Pepsi, he proved to be disastrous as the top manager of a tech company and unsophisticated about the technology field. His tenure was marred by infighting among top managers and expensive projects that flopped in the marketplace. (Remember the Apple Newton?) Sculley boosted the price of the Macintosh when personal computer prices were falling. The board ousted him in 1993, when Apple was slipping toward bankruptcy.

THE STAT: In 1987, Sculley was reported to be the highest-paid executive in Silicon Valley, earning a then-unheard-of $2.2 million.

Roger Smith General Motors

The CEO's job is often thankless, and no one was ever thanked less than Roger Smith, General Motors chairman from 1981 to 1990 and the unwitting stooge of Michael Moore's mockumentary Roger and Me.

He started his career at the company in 1949 as a green-eyeshade guy, a lowly accounting clerk. His 1984 reorganization attempted to streamline GM's back-of-the-house operations but was, in a word, a disaster. It sowed confusion and disorder that practically idled the automaker for months. Current CEO Rick Wagoner has said, "We've been 12 to 14 years digging out from that."

Al Dunlap Scott Paper/Sunbeam Corporation

Picked by the board of Scott Paper Co. as the man to turn the struggling company around, Dunlap earned his nickname "Chainsaw Al" by slicing 11,000 employees. When Scott merged with Kimberly-Clark, Dunlap's payoff was estimated at more than $100 million.

Dunlap's memoir/manifesto, Mean Business, roughly coincided with his next CEO star turn, which was also to be his last. Sunbeam's stock surged on the news that the Chainsaw was coming; massive workforce reductions and factory closures followed within months.

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Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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