SpriteNews No Longer Looking for New CEO

SpriteNews No Longer Looking for New CEO ◊

By John Jensen ◊

11/9/12

It’s no secret that for many years, SpriteNews has run large budget deficits, accumulated massive debts, and stumbled under the burden of an inefficient, bureaucratic organizational structure.

Seeing the obvious need to make changes, our Board of Directors has been vetting candidates to replace our current CEO, who came into the job with a fresh face, a lot of charisma, and a lot of inspiring words about changing the way we had been doing business.

After several years on the job, however, it has become painfully clear that our CEO hasn’t lived up to his promises.  He’s actually made many things worse.  For example, one of the points our CEO sold the Board on when he was interviewing was the need for strategic and operational alignment among the various departments.  He was very high on giving all the departments a voice and a stake in making big decisions.  Instead of bringing them together, however, he’s pitted them against each other, marginalized some, and blamed everyone but himself for his failures.

Remarkably, he has made our budget deficits even larger and refused to take suggestions from the other managers about how to fix our problems.  Several times, he has stood up and walked out of meetings when he wasn’t getting his way.  It has been very, very disappointing.

In looking for a new CEO, our board brought in a lot of well-known talent for vetting.  Some are industry veterans, some are bright, young stars, but they’d all probably do a better job than our current CEO.  After a year, we narrowed our search to one candidate who seemed perfect for the job.

This candidate has been enormously successful in just about everything he’s done and genuinely commands the respect of everyone he’s worked with.  He has extensive experience in fixing just the sort of problems we’ve been facing.  In fact, very few in the industry have his track record of success in turning around large, bloated, inefficient organizations with massive budget problems.   He’s recognized as something of a turnaround genius as well as an outstanding CEO.

In any event, we desperately needed a change and had finally found a candidate that seemed tailor made for the job – a godsend, really.  When our 20-member Board voted on whether to terminate the current CEO and hire the new guy, 9 of them voted to keep the current CEO, 8 of them voted for the new guy, and three of them abstained.