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Posted: 07 Mar 2012 05:37 AM PST
Whose idea was it to associate something as sweet and nice as the color pink with something as nasty as firing people? Nobody enjoys getting that salmon-colored slip, but having the entire world know you've been canned adds another layer of misery to the experience. In the days before Twitter and the Internet, it was easier to quietly fade into the corporate mist after being axed. But for these eight people (and one company), being fired was a public affair.
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It sounds like a headline from some kind of parallel universe: "Steve Jobs fired from Apple." Surely the man who created the world's biggest company could never be cut from said company. Already a titan of the computer industry by age 23, Jobs was working as Apple's chief visionary in 1984 when the Macintosh debuted. With underwhelming sales, Jobs began to butt heads with CEO John Sculley, the man Jobs himself had brought on board. The board sided with Sculley and Jobs was "out, very publicly out" as he said later. He said he was such a public failure he felt like abandoning Silicon Valley altogether. As you may have noticed, he decided against it.
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Do you, uh, enjoy messy public firings? When Yahoo brought in Carol Bartz, the chief of software company Autodesk, as their CEO in 2009, people questioned if she had the skills to turn Yahoo's plummeting fortunes around. Turns out they were right to ask. After stock prices rose less than 10% in her 31 months as CEO, chairman Roy Bostock fired Bartz over the phone. Bartz responded by promptly emailing all 14,000 Yahoo employees with the subject line "Goodbye" and tersely informing them of Yahoo's action. Since then, Bartz has publicly bashed her former bosses with her trademark colorful language, calling them "doofuses" and saying they "f—ed [her] over."
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The hiring of Disney president Michael Ovitz was almost as newsworthy as his firing. Ovitz was a super-successful agent who had founded Creative Artists Agency. In 1995, Michael Eisner had need of a right-hand man, and chose the untested Ovitz over a man he thought was "smarter and much more ethical." Ovitz's 454-day run as president was a debacle. Before he even started, Eisner was allowing execs under Ovitz to opt out of reporting to Ovitz. When Eisner finally chopped him, Ovitz's golden parachute of $38 million in cash and an estimated $131 million in stock crashed the headlines of the business pages. Disney shareholders sued over the massive payout and all the gory details of the men's rocky relationship oozed out.
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Any time strip clubs factor into a firing, you know it's going to get some media coverage. Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker claimed that the $1,241 he'd dropped while at skin-bar Bourbon Street in Phoenix was more about rainmaking than making it rain. But Junker had quite a time trying to explain away the rest of the allegations in a 276-page report from the Fiesta Bowl that he had used corporate funds to reimburse nearly $50,000 of employees' political contributions. The board voted unanimously to fire him, and the Arizona attorney general is circling his carcass. It's the latest and biggest scandal to rock the Bowl Championship Series.
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Energy company Enron Corporation imploded in probably the biggest corporate scandal in American history. For years the company had posted huge earnings and was named "Most Innovative Company" by Fortune magazine six years in a row. It turned out their innovation was fraudulent accounting. After several audits revealed rampant asset fudging, on Dec. 2, 2001, Enron stunned the world by declaring the biggest Chapter 11 bankruptcy in history at the time. Six weeks later, the company fired its auditing firm Arthur Anderson, citing the "disciplinary actions taken against several of Andersen's partners." AA fired right back, saying, "As a matter of fact our relationship with Enron ended when the company's business failed and it went into bankruptcy."
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]It's weird to think of Charlie Sheen as being a major corporate asset, but that's really what he was. While he was still sporting ridiculous shirts on CBS's "Two and a Half Men," the show was the most-watched program in America and the crown jewel in the TV network's empire, pulling in 15 million viewers each week. Sheen's increasingly erratic, drug-induced behavior became a world-wide joke but a nightmare for his bosses, whom Sheen publicly trashed as "clowns" and "AA Nazis." CBS had finally had enough in March of 2011 and terminated him. Sheen then kept the firing fire burning by launching a tour he called "I've Lost My Job, I'm Desperately Out of Touch with Reality and Owe Millions in Child Support."
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In September 2010, Jack Griffin was hired by Time Warner's CEO Jeff Bewkes to head Time Inc., the corporation's magazine arm. On February 17, 2011, Time employees opened up their emails to find a message from Bewkes relating Griffin's hasty shove out the door. The publishing community was flummoxed at the apparent fiasco. Publicly, Bewkes contributed the ousting to a leadership style that "did not mesh." But the industry was abuzz with gossip that Griffin's egoism, mild sexism, and odd religious references were really what caused him to be eighty-sixed after barely five months in the big office.
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Mr. Woodford holds the dubious distinction of having one of the shortest tenures as a CEO of a major corporation in the history of tenures. Woodford had worked at camera manufacturer Olympus for three decades before he took the job as CEO in October 2011. Before the month was out, Woodford had blown the whistle on enormous company accounting fraud of $1.7 billion that had gone on for years. So two weeks after taking over, the Japanese Board of Directors fired him for "not understanding Japanese culture." This launched another wave of publicity in an already huge scandal, as angry investors called for his reinstatement and Woodford sued the company for unfair dismissal.
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Mark Hurd certainly lasted longer than one of his predecessors at Hewlett Packard, who was forced to resign after about six weeks, but he went out much more disgraced. The story was a tabloid editor's dream come true. Hurd had been embezzling company money to give employee Jodie Fisher, who also happened to be a former soft-core porn star and Playboy model and reality TV star. Fisher sued Hurd for sexual harassment, which HP's board found no evidence of but were sufficiently nervous about that they fired him over expense report irregularities. And then the shareholders sued them, claiming the company had lost $9 billion of market value over the affair.
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