my worst boss
...) as well as decisional (entrepreneurial (s4), negotiating (s4), conflict resolution (s2) and resource allocation (s3) skills) role. Each quality is graded on the scale from 0 to 10. The maximum score is 180 points. The company considered here is the world leader in the entertainment industry. The first flaw was his lack of vision as to which technological investments company should make. Instead of using technology to solve business problems, technology was implemented in a vacuum hoping that value can be built around it. What inevitably followed was that instead of creating an educated group of users, every solution would always have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator and in the process would loose its potential, flexibility and power to become a rigid prescription. Thus instead of positively shaping company’s culture (IT oriented culture results in higher company’s capitalization) (3)) it promulgated the stereotype of technological stupidity and ineptness of his peers and their subordinates. Externally, claims of successful new technology implementations (which often were grossly overstated or not true at all) were to create an impression of holding the “technological leading edge.” Maintaining poorly designed and poorly integrated “hi tech” applications incurred high support costs. Lack of clear direction and consistency of that direction translated into wasted R&D: after substantial effort results were never implemented. This left some engineers frustrated and despondent by such reckless waste of their resources. Planning, organizing and leading of projects were done by mid-managers and for the most part they did their job well. To my ex-boss’ credit he established effective ways of communicating with them on their progress, status and overall he seemed to be in good control over the process. On the other hand he had mediocre conceptual skills that resulted in mostly reactive not proactive actions. Implementations of policies and technologies often resulted from post facto losses (of revenue) and ultimately undermined his role as a leader. The fact that he still held the job (despite several such incidences) was commonly attributed to cronyism and his strong “political” alliances, especially with the company’s long time CFO. Because he was well read his technical orientation was superficially decent, however the actual technical skills and understanding were not. He has established effective venues of monitoring his staff and was able to disseminate useful information well. However, as a spokesperson he had no credibility as most of the information he communicated externally were misleading—not surprisingly for a person whose illusion was that “perception is reality.” He was completely ineffective dealing with interpersonal issues of his staff. He relegated his managerial duties by not intervening for the sake of team’s cohesion. Professional conflicts could be very constructive; however trivial personal rivalries never are. Lack of leadership in this area was corrosive to the team. By creating a super-class of “chosen ones” (those whose offices were in his immediate proximity—new building—while others (“the rest”) were physically separated in another (old) building—created strong team dysfunction which he never addressed. Compounding this was his tendency to avoid all conflicts for the sake of ...