| Rupert Murdoch makes the list of CEO screw-ups for the unrepentant hubris he displayed in handling the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty Imag |
26 December 11
man-made disaster triggered the worst of last year's Forbes CEO screwups list,
when BP chief Tony Hayward committed a series of public gaffes in the
wake of the April 2010 Gulf oil spill, and then resigned the following
October. This year, forces of nature created the backdrop for the boss
behavior we deem the worst: Masataka Shimizu, head of the Tokyo Electric
Power Co., known as Tepco, largely disappeared from public view after
the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami set off the worst
radiation release since Chernobyl. Subsequently, reports surfaced that
senior Tepco engineers had known for years that five of the company's
ten nuclear reactors in Fukushima prefecture had a dangerous design
flaw. But the company failed to make upgrades, dooming the reactors to a
series of meltdowns and explosions when the 45-foot tsunami hit.
Following the disaster, Shimizu made few public appearances, checking
himself into a hospital for a week. He resigned in May.
To put together our list, we consulted two professors
at Kellogg School of Management, Daniel Diermeier and Harry Kraemer;
Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld; a list provided
by Sydney Finkelstein, who teaches management at the Tuck School of
Business at Dartmouth; and Richard Levick, who runs Levick Strategic
Communications, a crisis communications firm in Washington, D.C.
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