Show Them The Door: 3 CEOs Who Need to Go
With the recent departures of Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal and Citigroup CEO Chuck Price,the question on everyone's mind is who will be the next to go. Today the Motley Fool is telling it straight by offering readers "3 CEOs Who Should Go."
First up, Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo. Why is no surprise: "Mozilo didn't seem to realize that the blatant real estate boom would ever come to an end, failing to put safeguards in place."
James Tobin of Boston Scientific is suffering the fallout from his company's acquisition of Guidant last year, and who predicted the trouble? James Tobin. At the time he warned:
"We're going to pay a lot of money for Guidant, and then we're going to wake up and discover we have a company with a lot of problems. And everyone will be wringing their hands and crying: 'My God, what have these guys done?' "Tobin gets points for prognostication but not enough to save his skin. Motley Fool's verdict: he should go too. If Mozilo failed risk management, and Tobin failed mergers & acquisitions, then Whole Foods' James Mackey failed ethics. The Motley Fool opines:
Mackey did an incredible job growing Whole Foods into a gourmet health-food behemoth, but his being caught last summer promoting his company's success on Yahoo! message boards while trashing competitor Wild Oats -- a company Whole Foods was in the process of purchasing -- perhaps gives a new meaning to the word "unethical."Give him the boot. What do you think? What other CEOs should be shown the door?