BP, Dell, Wall Street: Where have the corporate heroes gone?

Where are the Lee Iacocca's today? Where is loyalty to a company? Where is knowledge of a companies product? Where is Honor? It is there, but it resides in the struggling entrepreneur. The hungry designer and inventor. It is lost in the college business grad who thinks that the degree means that he or she knows how to run a business or market a product.

Where have the true leaders gone? They have been replaced by uber-rich, celebrity-seeking CEOs starring with Iacocca and Jack Welch, right down to Bill Gates and the others who vie with each other for highest-salary ranking and the spotlight. America is a moral wasteland, lets face it. The John Vogels and Warren Buffets of the world are a dying breed.

HA! HA! HA! The corporate hero is an oxymoron!

There is no way to make a billion dollars by being ethical or fair - or at the very least not profit with the people who are not ethical or fair - and generally cheat.

The history of corporations is littered with 1000's of companies that were bought out for the technology and all/most of the employees were dumped. And that's just one of the many, many ways of the large corporations.

Do the research people....

When we elect people as we have to political office, why should corporate America ignore the situation?
Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Bill Clinton, M. Waters....all had their hads in the development of the housing fiasco and they are still in positions of power/influence. (OK Clinton less than before but still has a national presence)

It has become easier for CEOs to use techniques like resource actions and outsourcing to make profits, rather than building their businesses. Almost no large companies are growing revenues now, but many are recording record profits. Stripping cost out of a company is not leadership. More CEOs need to be held accountable by BODs for organic growth.

Q. Where have they gone?
A. Laughing all the way to the bank.

If you are looking for heroes, you should stick with the comic books. Any serious candidate for business success has to be very rooted in the realities of human behavior. Those have more to do with what it takes to be top dog than they do with the fantasies of those who are looking for some lost god to worship.

The problem is that 90% of CEOs give the other 10% a bad name.
In the case of Wall St. CEOs, make that 99% and 1%.

Giants? No, just greedy little men, the lot of them. The mantra of business is "maximize share holder value" and that has translated as "profit at any cost". Ship jobs to China, who cares about the workers her or the affect on the Nations long term economic viability. It means cutting costs to the point of exploding oil rigs, collapsing mines and killing people. It means spending huge amounts of money to influence the making of law to the detriment of the democratic process. It is leadership in the pursuit of selfishness, leadership without social consciousness, leadership beholding to no country, moral or ethic other than greed. Start holding these people personally liable, put them in jail for their crimes. Tony Hayward's decisions to led to the death of a dozen people and the ruin of innumerable lives. He should pay a higher price than losing his job.

Got God Gang

good reporting Steve Pearlstein and Raju Narisetti

present status the ceo's, the leadership in this country has the maturity level of a high school student

usa ceo's go back to your private clubs and gated communities

all you girlie boys and your women who support girlie boys

matriarch society

psalm 127

more later....

The only thing you can say for sure about CEOs is that they want to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. And they will do whatever it takes to achieve this. Other people's lives, the planet we live on - these are nothing to a CEO. Like any mafia thug, he wants his money and he better get it.

CEO hero's? That's an oxymoron. Corporate CEOs are by definition sociopathic monsters who, in any sane society, would be locked away for their entire lives.

That anyone would consider a CEO heroic represents the sad state of both the US and world. Heroes do good to help others, CEOS, all of them, are simply greedy. Now they are finally being exposed all the way from tiny non-profits to multinational enterprises. Organizations can function without CEOs; it a business model worth the risks.

"Corporate heroes" is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

I could do without heroes if we could have some more ordinary, but steady, competence. Things like running an automobile company, banking, lending money and providing medical care are all things we used to do quite well. What happened to the business skills that we used to have?

JK Galbraith and EF Schumacher were two great economists who were alienated for predicting the failure of a capitalist system ruled by technocrats who were pay great amounts despite lackluster performance. Since Gov hasn't got moral capacity to prosecute those swindlers, they are dismissed with a huge GOLDEN PARACHUTE while their associates, employees, customers, etc are in DireStraits

* Uncle Sam vs. Enron *
...Why are a few people so anti-government, yet pro-corporation?? It doesn't make sense!
Most Corporate CEOs cheat their shareholders, employees, customers, AND avoid paying taxes to the United States government. (us)
--At least we vote for our leaders... We're not able to vote for CEOs and the corporations that control us.

Since when have we ever "lionized" the corporate giants in this country? We have hurled invective at successful businessmen from before the founding of our country. The greatest set of business leaders we've ever known, those that prospered from the end of the Civil War to the 1930s and propelled us into a first-class powerhouse, are known collectively in the history books as the Robber Barons. Look at how we attack successful companies today -- Microsoft, Wal-Mart, "Big Oil," McDonald's, etc. -- and you'll see why we have no "corporate heroes."

All CEO and other corporate executives care about is profit. If it destroys our environment, but profits them, they do it (see Global Warming). If it means the loss of millions of U.S. jobs, but profits them, they do it (see Offshoring). If it risks the health of our entire economy, but profits them in the short term, they do it (see Great Recession and Great Depression). If it results in the deaths of our troops and innocent civilians, but profits them, they're for it (see Military-Industrial Complex).

Corporations have the same rights as people under the law, but NO ethics. Therefore, their CEO's could never be heroes in any recognizable sense of the word.

World War II is the last of the great wars and those who died are true heroes. It was a different day back then. The military was draftees, not professionals. We didn't have enlisted soldiers with $100K salaries nor officers lining up post military service jobs with contractors back then. We fought in legitimate wars for self-defense and survival, not to "fight terrorists" 12,000 miles from home. Both WWI and II were like that. The biggest worry then was if you and the USA would survive. Not what you were going to make afterwards or how to "jack-up" your "disability claims" after the war.

The goal of a corporation (and its representatives - the board of directors ) is to turn in an economic profit while providing the service needed by its customers.

If we stay with this definition, the heroes of the corporate world become pretty clear - the Googles of this world who find new ways of easily finding information, the Procter and Gambles who keep finding products that solve life's little problems, the Coca Colas who make it their mission to make their products available on every corner of this earth and so on.

If heroes are missing today, it is our fault as shareholders that we overpaid for shares, overpaid for the board, overpaid for the promised synergies and were over optimistic in our projections of how much cola people would be consuming in 2020 .

Imagine that we were as pessimistic 10 years back about these companies as we were today - And, we would have found ourselves sporting a nice gain on all these shares and patting these corporate CEOs and calling them heroes for making possible a comfortable retirement .

I reject the term CEO Hero or call it at least an oxymoron, since a hero is by definition unselfish!
(can one be unselfish when there is a million dollar bonus at stake)?
With that said, perhaps large companies should consider a different management-setup because it will be harder and harder to find someone who can manage a large company to the satisfaction of employee's, shareholders, government and general public.

When will it become clear to organisations, bureaucracies, policy makers and governments that the only viable leadership of perpetually turbulent and/or competitive situations is Systems Leadership?

A human leader can only be an iconic representation of their organisation's governing systems. The person cannot possibly control the complete systems directly whilst simultaneously allowing them the freedoms to explore beyond their "leader's" personal knowledge, intelligences, competences, principles and preferences. Thus stagnation or disasters will always happen under this model.

Only a large network of aligned influences can begin to address the variety involved in disturbing complacency, exploring new futures and making continuous improvements.

This still ignores the creative imagination and new knowledge involved in shifts of paradigms and inventing new business/governance models.

A truly free, continuously developing, ethos management and purpose-defining system is the only way I know to address the systemic variety of possible inputs and outcomes.

I used to teach this to the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme in the 1980's and 1990's. Over the years we had a number of speakers and participants who came from BP.

I clearly failed at teaching Systems Leadership, so my iconography now needs refurbishing too. I now see that the most I could hope to achieve is to become an icon representing just one small node of a bigger system than my mind can possibly comprehend, my personality embrace or my values encompass.... Is that an accurate definition of an organisational or governmental leader in today's world? If so, we are in real trouble.

Corporate heroes is a very inappropriate term; quality leadership is one thing, but any thought of adding the term "heroes" is ridiculous. Corporations require strong leaders to help provide some consistency and stability in operations, but I've yet to meet one I would classify as a hero; in fact, every time I read comments or articles such as this one, it always refers to larger corporations as if to imply the size of the business matters. If you want to really find corporate heroes, I suggest looking into the ranks of the workers that make the corporation run, not the executives that receive the compensation and accolades for other peoples efforts.