OpEdNews - Article: The Least Productive People in the World

OpEdNews - Article: The Least Productive People in the World

Income and Productivity Charts

Productivity, as determined by labor output, has been measured for decades, or longer.But, while it's important to look at who, or what, is the most productive person or enterprise, shouldn't we also look at the least productive people, that is, the least effective laborers? Perhaps by understanding who the least productive people are, we can learn how to make them more productive. This would help them, and help society.

So, who are the least productive people?

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Pandit didn't create the mess Citi is in, but"when Pandit took over, Citi was already on track to report write-downs and increased credit costs of $20 billion. Today, the banking supermarket is propped up by $45 billion in bailouts and is, in effect, owned by the U.S. government.

THE STAT: Although Pandit's currently earning $1 a year, his pay package was valued at $38.2 million for 2008, a year when taxpayers kept the firm in business.

Carly Fiorina Hewlett-Packard

A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.

THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina's tenure.

Stanley O'Neal Merrill Lynch

Stanley O'Neal's abrasive personality and ruthless cost cutting earned him many enemies, but his push toward riskier bets and subprime exposure led to his ouster. After Merrill posted the biggest quarterly loss in its 93-year history--and O'Neal was caught approaching Wachovia about a merger without the board's approval--he was finally fired.

THE STAT: O'Neal walked out the door with $161.5 million in severance.

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.

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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.

Unable to flip Sunbeam to a new buyer, as he'd done with Scott, Dunlap was stuck actually running the company. He failed spectacularly. Within two miserable years, the board fired him. The tactics he'd used to stave off losses--the company overstated its net income by $60 million, which was real money back (in 1998)--earned him a civil suit from the SEC and a class-action suit by shareholders. Dunlap eventually settled both and was barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company.

Bernie Ebbers - Worldcom

The ultimate corporate shopaholic, Ebbers bought an obscure telephone carrier in the 1980s and went on a 17-year acquisition binge that turned it into the world's largest telecom company. Alas, his passion for dealmaking didn't translate into the savvy necessary for running the complex business. When telecom stocks went south in 2000, the company's massive debt was exposed. Ebbers tried to disguise it through fraudulent accounting. In 2005, three years after WorldCom filed for bankruptcy, he was convicted of overseeing $11 billion worth of accounting fraud. He's now serving a 25-year prison term.

THE STAT: When Ebbers resigned, in 2002, WorldCom stock had fallen to $1.79 from a peak of $64.50 in 1999.

Ken Lay - Enron

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