Chapter 25: There s Nothing There

Overview

How had Jim Oesterreicher gotten to such a God- awful point? How could he make such arrogant , ego-driven mistakes (as the reader will see)? It is a sad, unfair story, where Oesterreicher really was a sort of patsy ”on the one hand. On the other, nobody ever put a gun to his head and forced him into the chairman's suite. And once there, at the very top of a big public company, he was vulnerable to the kind of scrutiny ”then and now ”that the power, money, and responsibility of the office must always attract .

In the final crunch, Oesterreicher suffered the worst of leadership mistakes ”executive hubris .

At issue is the big leap that Mil Batten addressed at the top of this book. No one knows how a CEO-in-waiting will change once the mantle of leadership is on his shoulders. And Oesterreicher certainly changed ”but in unforeseen and unfortunate ways. His consensus-driven administration was weak in leadership and barren of viable new concepts. It was wholly incapable of the kind of introspection that might have detected and averted the ruinous drift of the company. And there was also a regrettable moral slippage when the surprising arrogance surfaced.