Glassdoor released its report of the 50 lowest-rated CEOs as determined by employee reviews on its site. I scractched out all the companies you don’t care about and ended up with this list of the 10 Crappiest CEOs (of consumer-facing compaines) (according to their employees)…
Rank – Company – CEO – approval rating
10. US Postal Service – Jack Potter – 21%
9. Sun Microsystems – Jonathan I. Schwartz – 21%
8. eBay – John J. Donahoe – 20%
7. Convergys (a horrible call center company) – Dave Dougherty – 19%
6. Pfizer – Jeff Kindler – 19%
5. Sears Holdings – W. Bruce Johnson – 19%
4. RadioShack – Julian C. Day – 16%
3. Sports Authority – Doug Morton – 12%
2. United Airlines – Glenn F. Tilton 8%
1. Office Depot – Steve Odland – 7%
Does this jibe with your experience? Who you would you nominate as the worst CEO?
Glassdoor Q3 CEO Watch List Report [GlassDoor] (Photo: Epiclectic)
* only CEOs with 50 or more reviews were included.
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I’m surprised my CEO did that well.
@Darkwish:
bob nardeli must not be employed right now… all time worst, the company killer.
Postmaster General Jack Potter’s hatred by postal employees is well deserved.
@Posthaus: Don’t all CEOs run companies where employees are regularly locked in closets with nothing to do, claiming that it’s in their contracts?
@Posthaus:
Is that why the employees always “Go Postal”?
@Posthaus: Pray do tell all the details, this has piqued my interest. I hardly ever hear anything about the postal service and the postmaster general, only about stamp rate increases.
@TheObserver: There are a lot of employees that aren’t happy about some of the cost saving measures that have been undertaken in the past couple of years.
@Posthaus: I Can Haz Details?
Holy crap, I just wrote a post in LOLspeak. Backing away from the computer in 3,2,1….
@Posthaus: I met Jack Potter once. He is a glorified LSM operator with 1) a penchant for ingesting huge portions of starch and 2) an ever-expanding waistline. They have a joke in the USPS: “What does ‘PMG’ stand for? ‘Potter Must Go.’”
fully agree with “the shack.” when i worked there, there was no sense of leadership or organization at the top, which floods down to the store level. it’s just all wrong.
@defectiveburger: ditto. they have coporate ADD in fort worth – it seems like every 3-6 months they blow all kinds of money on some kind of new marketing/training/sales gimmick.
i finally had enough when they decided that the financial burden for all the corporate shenanigans was going to rest squarely on the heads of associates & store managers. i took a 40% pay cut at the same time they were paying their fraud CEO $1.2 million to leave after 9 months worth of work b/c he lied about his education & multiple DWI charges.
& that was 3 years ago. from what i’ve heard, it’s gotten worse.
@defectiveburger: Dude, it’s been going downhill ever since Charles Tandy died. I started work at RS just before he passed away and though I never get to meet him, my manager and a couple of the people who had worked for him did. He regularly called his managers to see how things were going. (In fact one guy who worked at my store before I started there picked up the phone and the voice on the other end asked to speak to the manager. “Who’s calling?” he asked. “It’s Charles Tandy.” said the voice. Thinking this was a prank, the guy asked, “Charles Tandy who?” Not only did he not get fired, he ended up running his own store.
) He seemed to really care about his stores and his chain. But I guess that was another time, another place and another type of CEO.
Steve Odland!!! Hahahaha, that perfectly makes sense to me. He is a friend of Sean Rice from Hudson River Group, who was my previous job’s CEO. WORST CEO EVER. He used to harass employees by telling them, “this is what your parents paid your college education for”. And while he makes his employees carry personal items like wine to his car, he used to say “those wines cost more than your salary.” Probably didn’t make his name next to Steve Odland because HRG has less than 50 employees. Two POS CEOs are friends together. Makes sense!!!
@milkcake: HRG must be run by GOB. “Yeah, the guy wearing the $4,000 suit is [going to pick up wine] for the guy who doesn’t make that in four months. Come on.”
@varro: I take offense; I wear nothing less than $5,000 suits now. But yeah, like the guy in the $6,000 suit is going to care what the internet thinks of him? Come on!
@milkcake: I would have accidentally tripped and broken all of the bottles, and gotten so scared that I would have taken a dump on whatever was left and then proceed to nervously wipe my ass with his tie only to forcefully shake his hand with my dirty hand to thank him for future employment recomendations.
@madog: that sir, is an inexcusable waste of good wine!
instead, might i recommend guzzling his wine, pissing in the empty bottles, replacing the cork & sending him home to an interesting nite with his mistress.
@mac-phisto: Before he leaves though, stinkpalm him!
“Say, would you like a chocolate covered pretzel? They’re a little melty from being in my pocket, but they’re oh so good”
@milkcake:
Jesus christ, I think that’s time to smash one of the bottles and cut the fucker with it.
I’m surprised eBay is that high up. I was expecting it to be at least in the top 5 worst.
The new Borders CEO is pretty awful too, but perhaps too new to make the list
@Eldritch: Actually I hear the new CEO is pretty good, comparatively speaking.
Except for Ebay and Sun, they are all stores where people go for part time jobs.
Amazingly, Wall Street is absent from the list.
@dohtem: Really, the post office and Pfizer offer part time jobs?
@redskull: I scanned the list quickly and missed Pfizer.
I thought the post office did. I guess I’m mistaken.
@dohtem: There’s a waiting list for postal service jobs where I live. Good benefits, excellent pay, and lots of holidays…
@bennilynn:
Here, too. I tried to get in there several times then finally gave up and got into another hated industry.
@dohtem: You may have missed this sentence since you only scanned the list.
Wall Street isn’t exactly consumer facing (and most people don’t care how crappy those CEOs are), so those CEOs were likely excluded. And I doubt United directly employs many part-timers.
@dohtem: It’s also worth noting that Glassdoor requires proof of past or present employment before they will consider certain bits of information. I’m assuming CEO ratings require a high level position in the company, IE you have to be qualified to rate that CEO. Even if it doesn’t, it’s unlikely the high school drop-outs that The Shack and Office Depot employ for two weeks at a time are rating CEOs on Glassdoor.
@dohtem: with the ‘wall street’ companies we love to hate, it’s not just the CEO who makes an obscene amount of money. Capital-b Billions in bonuses; that’s a lot of happy campers and not just the man sitting at the top with the biggest bag of loot.
I used to work for Convergys years ago. I don’t miss that place at all. Shit hole of the highest order.
@Rask: Seconded!
@Rask:
Thirded. I worked there while I was in college. Shit hole is offensive to shit holes. That place was horrible.
@tbax929 is rooting for a Phillies repeat:
fourthed… if that place was a “shithole” it would’ve been an improvement to it….Loved the random firings.. You would be talking to the person in the cube next to you between calls, then a supervisor would walk up to them and say ‘come with me and grab your stuff’. That was the last you every saw of them…
Only place I saw over 50 Employees quit in a day and over a 100 in a week.
@Rask: I just heard some groovy Convergys stories over the weekend and yours echo what I heard from a family of former workers…
You don’t consider Rain Bird or Xilinx consumer-facing companies?
When this came across my RSS feed I first thought it said “creepiest” CEOs.
From talking to all the people that I know who work for USPS I’m actually surprised about Jack(ass) Potter not being in the top 5.
@rocketbear79: If it said “creepiest CEOs”, you’d notice the absence of Dov Charney on the list…
Wow. I didn’t make the list.
@StanTheManDean: Well, I gave you a *really* crappy review, but seeing as I’m your only employee you didn’t have enough to get ranked. See you tomorrow, boss!
From what I can tell, all of those CEO’s (and most of the ones in the big meltdown last year) are late-aged Caucasian men. Maybe us white guys aren’t the best candidates for the job?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being racist at all. I’m just saying that some people are better at some jobs than others – most golfers are white, most basketball players are black, etc.
@Ursus Maritimus: But how many late-aged Caucasian men were evaluated and did not make the list of the crappiest? If 10,000 CEOs were reviewed and 4,500 were late-aged white men and 10 were voted the worst… well then maybe the 4,400 late-aged white men who their employees enjoyed working for ARE the best candidates for their jobs.
“I’m not being racist at all… I just bring race into conversations that have nothing to do with them.”
@Ursus Maritimus: Maybe they need wise Latina CEOs.
@takotchi: And CNN’s Lou Dobbs can spew his thinly veiled racist comments.
@dohtem: Why, Lou Dobbs isn’t racist! It just magically happens to be that Mexicans/Mexican-Americans are the sole cause of everything in America that has ever gone wrong!
@Aquasol:
Ok.. for the last damn time, Lou Dobbs is married to a mexican, Debi Lee Segura. Now will all of you racists bastards shut up?
@Aquasol:
Mexican isn’t a race, it’s a nationality. Mexicans can be of any race from lily white to black as coal, they can even be Asian.
@Powerlurker: You do realize that because I’m obviously white and from America and if I said “I’m Puerto Rican” when questioned about my nationality, it might sound a bit off, right?
@VagrantRadio:
As far as the US census bureau is concerned, Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race. Therefore, you can’t be racist towards Hispanics or Mexicans. You can, however, be xenophobic towards them. If you’re Puerto Rican, you’re Puerto Rican (and Hispanic) regardless of the color of your skin. A friend of mine from college had a Mexican mother, a Germanic last name, and was even more pasty white than me, and as far as the US Government and the university admissions people were concerned, he was Hispanic.
@dohtem:
Perhaps you are unaware that Lou Dobbs is married to a mexican… Debi Lee Segura.
@Ursus Maritimus: Two words: Tiger Woods.
There are a heck of a lot of jokes going undetected in this thread.
@Ursus Maritimus: They also all happen to have feet.
Obviously, mandatory amputations would increase CEO quality.
@Ursus Maritimus: Just as long as you both know quotes from the movie “Caddyshack” by heart, and belong to several country clubs with yearly membership fees of +$10,000 you’re usually in as a CEO…
How in the world did Sam Palmisano at IBM not make the list? May we should wait for the results of the insider trading investigation to be finished and results will change.
@njtrout: It’s an employee nomination. If he insider trades but isn’t a jackass to them they probably aren’t bitching about him much.
@njtrout: He may be a douchebag, but IBM clearly has a strategy and manages shareholder value very closely. Spent a good half of my career there before deciding to remain a shareholder and stop being an employee, thereby gaining all of the benefits of one with none of the excruciating pain of the other.
@njtrout:
He should be on the list. He has been to unable to grow revenue except through acquisition. The only way IBM has been cranking on profits is by an anorexic focus on cutting costs.
IBM is now the largest offshorer of American jobs, meanwhile the survivors have to work hardware and harder for flatlined pay. IBM once had 270,000 jobs in the US, it’s now down to 100,000 and heading on its way to 30,000 – 5,000 jobs a quarter.
It’s a second-rate company run by third-rate psychopaths.
We lost one last week, due to his arrest for insider trading. People cheered on the news. Maybe more to come?
You do not want anyone to work there except perhaps your worst enemy.
This proves again that there’s a direct relationship between crappy management and a crappy company.
Most of the companies the CEOs listed above manage have frequently been cited here at the consumerist and elsewhere for their shameful misdeeds and shortcomings…
@jpdanzig: Absolutely. And if you look at the list of highest rated CEOs it shows a similar correlation.
@ExtraCelestial: Really? Goldman Sachs is an excellently run company? I’m thinking not so much.
@floraposte:
[www.guardian.co.uk]
[money.cnn.com]
Well I’m definitely not going to DEFEND them (especially not as a top 10 position), but as far as the way they treat their employees, and the turnaround they’ve been having as of late, for the industry he’s in (which is basically synonymous with corporate misconduct) he’s not half bad. Certainly better than his peers.
@ExtraCelestial: I don’t see any reason to doubt that–I’m just disagreeing with the notion that companies who are scoring high on CEO approval are also necessarily the better companies for consumers. I’d like to think it reliably correlated, but not always.
@floraposte: I’m guessing the correlation is stronger on the low end. If you treat your employees like dirt, you’re probably more likely to treat your customers badly. On the other hand, you might treat your employees well, while treating your customers badly.
In the post above, Ben means “jibe” (an informal word meaning agreement), not “gibe” (a small joke or insult).
I point this out because until recently, I’d been using “jive” (a style of music or deceptive/glib talk) in place of “jibe”. And now that I’ve seen the error of my ways, I’ve noticed others using “jive” instead of “jibe” as well (so it wasn’t just me).
One of my co-worker gets all those picky things wrong: ensure/insure, “mute point”, and the my favorite(since it has two errors) “the gambit from A to B”.
(I’m not normally picky, by the way.)
@Taed:
I just spent two minutes of my life reading that post. I want my two minutes back.
@tbax929 is rooting for a Phillies repeat: Apologies. I have some extra AT&T rollover minutes that bought at some woman’s yard sale that I could send you…
@Taed: Just make sure you haven’t been using them to play fetch with your dog, please.
@Taed: I LOVE Ensures!
@Taed: See the movie “Airplane” for a demonstration of jive.
@Taed: Actually, both “gibe” and “jibe” are acceptable and historically documented for the “small jest” meaning (OED), and the j spelling is more widely used in the U.S. But “jive” is indeed a recent conflation with “jibe.”
@floraposte: Not to mention that jibe is also a sailing term.
Hollywood Video has had a nice rotation of crappy CEOs who buy up a majority share, inflate the stock with terrible short-term gain policies that lose all the regular customers, sell them, and the CFO scoops up the majority share after it crashes.
Rinse. Repeat.
Thanks, CJ Gabe Gabriel.
@zekedms: I didn’t realize Hollywood Video was still in business?!
@ExtraCelestial: Says it all, doesn’t it?
Lots of HWV/MovieGallery stores closed, mostly they’re keeping the ones that are cheapest on rent and running costs. But they keep putting new suicidal plans out. Take away rainchecks again, kill early return credits again, introduce Powerplay which can’t even remotely compete with Netflix, let alone Blockbuster.
But for a month or two, the profit really looked good and stock went up for Sheriff, the new CEO. It won’t be long before he sells it off, and the cycle begins anew.
@zekedms: And to think I was very happy to see a Hollywood Nail Salon and LA Tanning Salon actually in Hollywood and in Los Angeles when I visited.
But I missed the Hollywood Video location there…
Hmm. For some reason, the companies with crappy CEOs also seem to correlate with companies with crappy service.
Something called “Corporate Executive Board” is #15 crappiest. What a funny name for a company. I wonder what they do (Wikipedia was no help on this one.)
@Nytmare: But Google worked. Basically they’re either an executive level consultant firm, or a buzzword factory. Not that there’s much difference.
I scractched out all the companies you don’t care about
Well now of course I have to look at the whole list.
No Dov Charney of American Apparel?
@Ratty: The employees were too coked up to get their votes in on time.
@ExtraCelestial: plus, he’s buying their coke, so that offsets some of the crappier aspects of his reign.
@Ratty: I was surprised at that one, too.
I know that I’m being that guy, but gibe, jibe, and jive are all different words.
Gibe: to taunt
Jibe: to be in harmony or accord; agree (this is the meaning intended here)
Jive: the “shuck and jive” and “jive talk” definitions are the only ones recognized by dictionary.com
Currently, jive is getting pretty widely use as a synonym for jibe, but it’s not really correct.
Just sayin’.
And Office 2007 has made me swear much more than any of the products/services offered by any of these companies listed here. I’d even go so far as to say that the USPS, though their counter service can suck, does a great job.
I’m surprised ebay is on there. I figured they’d have replaced Meg Whitman with an equal caliber leader after she brought ebay up and dominated everything.
I’m surprised there weren’t more retail chains in there. We HATED our CEO at Albertson’s when I worked there in college. He was one of Jack Welch’s protege-fails.
@downwithmonstercable:
Us eBay people HATE meg whitman as much if not more than donowhore. We fell out when McCain chatted her up during the election, it cost him votes I’m sure.
The fact that Mark Shapiro is not on the list is incredibly surprising. He’s the CEO of Six Flags, and in the 4 years that he’s headed operations at corporate, that same number of rides have been taken from my home park (Great America). That plus the merciless advertising and shoddy maintenance and upkeep, and this guy translates into terrible parks.
My old job was at PayPal, ie Ebay, I’d have to agree. Being on the front lines of the phones, I’d get to hear the whole: our customers hear you as the voice of the company, as an unrelated item, you can’t work disputes for customers or call the merchant anymore.
Glad to be gone
I’m surprised that Mikey Dell isn’t in the top 10, with all DHell’s layoffs and their obsession with cutting costs as much as possible, except when it comes to executive compensation.
@Aisley:
It doesn’t work at our company. If you negatively rate management, they come hunt your ass down even though ‘all responses are anonymous’…
How did Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft Foods not make the list?
Not only is she outsourcing thousands of jobs to India & the Philippines, but she has raised the price of Kraft products.
All the employees in the Chicago area, where many of Kraft’s jobs are, hate her.
I’m shocked that Gregg Steinhafel, Target’s CEO isn’t on there. The moves he’s made makes me think he’s a plant by Wal-Mart to destroy Target.
Some of the things make me scratch my head and wonder if he ever set foot in a business school
Ben?……..Ben?
I have to agree about Convergys. The call center I was at in Toledo, OH was closed down many years ago. We were the last call center left in the US (rest in Canada) doing former AT&T broadband, now Comcast tech support. We had the best scores on quality, least repeat calls, etc., but they didn’t care. Gotta love an Ohio company laying off entire centers in their home state to move ‘em to Canada!
@GIClutch: The term, I believe, is “lower cost labor market”. You could be a support god, and it won’t matter. That guy in makes $350 USD a month, and you don’t. Until the move costs them enough customers to affect the bottom line (and it won’t, if history is any indication), you’re a cost center, and outsourcing your job to someone who can’t do it but is cheap is just as good for the bottom line as it was having you do the job well.
Convergys has pretty much outsourced all of their Canadian call centers to India now as well – I think the moves they made a few years ago shipping things to Canada was simply a layover for the business as it ramped up it’s operations in places like Delhi, Pune, etc.
Welcome to running a support business, where how good you are at your job doesn’t matter a hill of beans if someone can do it (poorly, not at all, it doesn’t matter) for a fraction of the cost.
I worked for one of the companies you scratched out. It deserved to be in the top ten. I think I have PTSD from working there.
How can we get the pope on that list as CEO of the catholic church. Lots of hate, skeletons, ruined lives, and whatnot there.
@wvFrugan: The people who actually work for him don’t feel that way.
Everybody that works gets a performance review of one type or the other, right? Well, in HR there’s a very lovely type of performance review called “the 360 performance review”. This is the one we desperately need to use in banks, investment firms, credit card companies and mortgage companies. What is so “lovely” about this type of review you ask? Well this is the type of review where the employee gets his/her performance reviewed by superiors, peers and, more special, subordinates. Oh, believe you me, it works and works beautifully!
The thing is that once, they destroy one company and collect their parachute, another company will pick them up and pay them even more to do the same.
I keep offering my services to destroy a company, but no takers. I’ll even do it for 1/10 of what most CEO’s make, a measely $1,000,000 per year for 5 years and a $1,000,000 parachute.
Definitely glad that Office Depot seems to have made the top of the list. The store near to where my grandmother lives has “awesome” customer service. Purchased a chair that had a three year warranty, broke after a year (metal welding just broke on the base). Exchanged it for a new one, and the new one was actually another customer return that had a broken arm. Exchange that one again, and the arm of that chair broke within a month (same break as the first exchange unit no less). I politely asked them for a refund, and the manager tried to claim that the chair was a much cheaper model than the one I had purchased. After showing them a receipt that it was a $200+ chair, the manager returned my money. They were even nice enough to ask me to consider shopping elsewhere in the future.
The store near my undergraduate college had crappy customer service as well. My wife and I only shopped there for binders.
Now, having moved to go to graduate school…the Office Depot here sucks as well. I experienced their “excellent” customer service when trying to buy a desk with an Office Depot coupon. First the manager accused me of hacking their website and that there was no coupon, and then would not sell it to me with the coupon discount. The desk was really nice for the money, so I went ahead and bought it through the online store and they had to eat the cost of shipping it too. Stupid move Office Depot, as I was willing to spare you the cost of shipping and hauled it home myself if they applied the coupon in store.
Within a month, I found out the desk had some serious stability and build quality issues. Parts had not been manufactured right, and Office Depot even acknowledged there had been a lot of returns and repairs of the same desk. Fast forward a week, and the tempered glass shatters.
The manager who handled my return (the same one that accused me of hacking the website) handled the return very well. Originally told me that glass does not break like that, that I had to have broken it myself. After I told her about the complaints I found online, and again told her how the desk broke (I imagine she was trying to test me to see if I was lying)…I told her that I was expecting Office Depot to make this right and this was their last chance to do so. I’d already been told that Office Depot was considering a recall of the desk and reminded the manager that I knew about that.
Refund was processed five minutes later. One minute after that I was out of the store and do not plan to return to any Office Depot unless I have no choice.
@night_2004: Office Depot exists in a weird place outside of the Staples and Office Max circle of customer service…
Its obvious as these companies have a bad impression among people. So the CEO’s cannot be very much effective. Anyway thanks for the analysis..
Office Depot FTW! As a former employee I can honestly say the customer service and knowledge were much higher before Steve Odland came around. Staffing hours were higher meaning an all around better experience for both staff and customers, but alas as we all know payroll must be slash, slash, slashed to increase baster… err, shareholder value. Eff the Customer and bring on the profit! How Bob Nardelli of you, Steve, this is one award you have certainly earned.
UA’s CEO made the list. Somehow I’m not surprised.
@jamar0303: Any company which sports its own complaint site:
http://www.untied.com
with legions of complaints should be on the list -no questions asked.
Huh. I guess they polled people working in RadioShack stores, not the corporate office. I think Julian’s doing a fine job.
Bill Gates. The MSN type operating systems leave users vulnerable to viruses and other nasty things and this has been going on since it started.
Am I the only one who can’t see the full list of 50? I only see 25 when I follow the link.
I worked for an ad agency in not too far from UNC-Chapel Hill. It was run by a husband and wife team and BOTH of them were psychotic. I mean, needs daily meds psychotic. It’s one of two places that I’ve worked where the employees would’ve happily pushed one or both of the loonies running the asylum out in front of a bus. Or off the top of the office building we worked at. Currently, the two lunatics are trying to save their sinking business; those of us who are former employees are praying that it goes down in a flaming ball of mediocrity.
If Bob Nardelli hadn’t left Home Depot, I’d have to nominate him for #0.
If Experian was larger, I think Chris Callero could get in the top 50. He lays off competent high skilled workers so he can send the jobs to South America. During a town hall meeting he assure that it’s only the low skilled jobs that moved. When people complain that they can’t understand their new coworkers, they are told to shut up or they’d be fired. Yeah, great job Chris!
There should be a separate category for all the private-equity company CEOs who buy distressed companies then promptly mess over the lives and livelihoods of those companies’ workers.
Most of these companies are not doing to well either.