Sydney Finkelstein is a professor of strategy and leadership at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and the author of the bestselling book “Why Smart Executives Fail.”
How do you go from being one of the country’s most-renowned and respected business leaders to landing on the list of the Worst C.E.O.’s of 2011? Did the glory go to your head, so that you believed you knew more than everyone else? Did you take your eye off the ball because you thought all was well in the kingdom? Or was it that staying on top was just so darn difficult that there was only one way to go?
This year, there was a little of each. Arrogant chief executives, like the pair at the top of Research in Motion, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, and of course Jon S. Corzine, late of MF Global. Complacent chiefs, like William C. Weldon at the bellwether Johnson & Johnson. And what of Reed Hastings, the much-maligned boss at Netflix? Chalk that up to his bumbling response to the forces of creative destruction at work. [read]
