Carillion bosses' personal greed and recklessness led to downfall: MPs
History has an uncanny knack of repeating itself, byzantine corporate chicanery is no exception.
Informed educated executives ought to have known better. However, for as long as we hubristically ignore psychopathology and remain dullard acolytes of alleged superior intelligence quotients, the future appears worrisome.
Carillion should never have happened. It unfortunately did. Yet again, the innocent suffer with no recourse.
Same old, same old and the usual suspects. The pestilential three (3) musketeers.
- The avaricious executive search firms who inveterately nominate pathological muppets, knaves and supine invertebrates.
- The venal auditing cartel and;
- The expedient, incompetent and deviant executive leadership teams.
The précis attempts to highlight the premonitory signals and how to avoid recidivistic corporate history!
LESSONS:
- Appoint the best balanced Board apropos relevant experience, sector expertise and mix.
- Appoint a competent and psychologically healthy Chair person.
- Underestimate the incompetence of the Chair of the Human Resources & Compensation Sub-Committee, at you own peril.
- Learn quickly that Big Brands, for example, Tesco and BP do not equate to competence and capability when recruiting from their ranks.
- Appoint the best balanced CEO. To appoint the wrong person is asinine, to repeat the erratum, recidivistic-ally is criminal. Develop a dynamic CEO Succession bench.
- Recognise that Big Audit are in collusion, grossly venal and incompetent.
- Big Audit must decouple their core audit business from their consulting business.
- Manage Big Audit, assiduously. Take notice of the ratio of debt to cash on hand at the time of “death.”
- Notice how Big Audit were instrumental in the collapse of a client and the professional fees earned, knowing that the client was in “intensive care”; moreover, take notice that, Big Audit and Big Law, were appointed their administrators!
- Take notice that Big Audit and Big Law were paid in full, ahead of preferential creditors.
- Be aware of the incontrovertible fact that, many Executive Leadership Teams, are suggestible, naive and incompetent. Rote thinking and concomitant performance, is the best evidenced skill. Think prosaic “paint by numbers.”
- Hocus-pocus is alive and well.
- Strategic suicide, does cause corporate death. Carillion, committed the cardinal sin of recklessly departing its core competence.
- Hope is not a strategy.
- The accounting principles of Goodwill and Negative Accruals, both need to be struck out of GAAP [update: the global agency has this recommendation presently under review]
- Growth for growth’s sake incubates terminal disease. Think the Canadian and UAE subsidiaries.
- Never place all your eggs in one basket. Think Carillion’s over-dependence on the UK Government for revenue.
- Cost cutting can never ever be a substitute for enduring revenue creation.
- Know your enemies! John Manzoni. He had personally architected corporate failures in specific regard to health & safety and corporate “death.”
- British Society . . . a vicious cocktail of suffused snobbery and thuggery!
- Remember, the TRUTH, shall always set you free.
Op-Ed - Incompetent Leaders Continue to Deceive and Manipulate Impressionistic and Hollow Masses
PLEASE NOTE: Robert C. Maybery, no longer publishes op-eds, therefore, this catalogue has greater historical importance, today, than ever before. It is important to note that, upon reading the sample of op-eds, it will become compellingly evident that Robert C. Maybery, has portended significant global trends that are being manifest today, yet his premonitory sagacity has been foolhardily ignored. These global trends are:
- War, is inevitable; but its manifestation will represent a marked step change from historical patterns.
- World peace will remain the holy grail without social justice.
- Venality and incompetent Governments are inextricably linked to the global leadership crisis, in both public and private domains.
- The global talent conundrum.
- The ineptitude of Boards of Directors.
- The limitations of business school executive education and Director accreditation.
- The rise of cost of living crisis.
- The need to reform both education and capitalism.
- The risk of global exogenous events.
- The need for public and private partnerships to create sustainable societies.
- Extolled for the need to decouple the big 4 audit firms from their consulting businesses – EY, are the first to augment this process.
Op-Ed - Post Modern - You can Have It!
PLEASE NOTE: Robert C. Maybery, no longer publishes op-eds, therefore, this catalogue has greater historical importance, today, than ever before. It is important to note that, upon reading the sample of op-eds, it will become compellingly evident that Robert C. Maybery, has portended significant global trends that are being manifest today, yet his premonitory sagacity has been foolhardily ignored. These global trends are:
- War, is inevitable; but its manifestation will represent a marked step change from historical patterns.
- World peace will remain the holy grail without social justice.
- Venality and incompetent Governments are inextricably linked to the global leadership crisis, in both public and private domains.
- The global talent conundrum.
- The ineptitude of Boards of Directors.
- The limitations of business school executive education and Director accreditation.
- The rise of cost of living crisis.
- The need to reform both education and capitalism.
- The risk of global exogenous events.
- The need for public and private partnerships to create sustainable societies.
- Extolled for the need to decouple the big 4 audit firms from their consulting businesses – EY, are the first to augment this process.
