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Lamest Business Excuse of the Year
The self-esteem movement isn’t just making our kids responsibility-shirkers—the adults might be even worse. As Daniel Gross points out in Newsweek today, CEOs of troubled companies from Eddie Bauer to Creative Scrapbooking to Six Flags are blaming balance sheets for their bankruptcies. That’s sort of like blaming your credit card statement for getting you into $80,000 worth of debt.
“Balance sheets are tools, not people or forces of nature,” Gross points out. “And a good craftsman never blames his tools.”
Top execs—and Wall Street traders—are happy to take credit for success in boom times, when even tic-tac-toe-playing chickens can make money. If we’re going to keep that kind hubris from taking over the economy again (at least for a little while), what’s needed is for leaders to be candid about their decisions, their errors and the fallout. At very least, they could pretend they understand finance—and blame the mortgage meltdown instead.
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Asking for candor from top executives, Wall Street traders, and the like… it’s a perfectly reasonable demand. Likelihood of this happening: alas, not even worth speculating. Hey, it was all the fault of their balance sheets. Or their Blackberries. Or the dry cleaner.