CEOs Who Need To Return To Business School

24/7 Wall Street:

Looking around the wreckage of some of the big cap companies it is not hard to find a few CEOs who probably need to go back to business school. Wall St. would like to see them at Harvard so they would get the best education possible, but the school in Cambridge might not let them in.

First on the list is Hector Ruiz of AMD (AMD). He already has a PhD, but it may be the money order kind that you can get through the mail. Ruiz has effectively taken AMD from a high-margin chip company which had the technology to compete with larger rival Intel (INTC) to a sad shadow with big debt and small margins. He engineered the buy-out of graphics chip company ATI, which has been a disaster of their first order. Less than two years ago AMD traded at above $42. It now sits at under $10.

James Tobin, the CEO of Boston Scientific (BSX), should get a return ticket. The company has a solid medical device operation. Then Tobin decided to get into a bidding war for Guidant and ended up with a balance sheet with almost $9 billion in debt. When the company's core cardiac stent business started to crater due concerns about safety, the firm had no cash for dry powder. His handsome job has taken the shares from $27 two years ago to just above $12. Now, he is selling off he company in piece to raise dough.

Read the whole story: 24/7 Wall Street

Comments

[ipitombi]

Isn't Business School where they learn to be crooked and incompetent in the first place? Bad example: Harvard MBA George W Bush.

Harvard Business School has not been able to measure up to our local two-year community college since then.

[olephart]

"a few CEOs who probably need to go back to business school."


Wrong. It's business school that turns out the idiots that run things. What businessmen really need is a real education that can only be obtained through working at or at least understanding the jobs they're suppose to oversee. When I need to find out anything at my company I go directly to those who are doing the work. Money is made from the bottom up, not the top down. The current financial disaster is proof enough. The best a CEO can do for his (her) company is guide it away from the rocks. It's the people below decks, shoveling coal into the boilers that make the ship go.

[jumperpin]

Totally wrong headline. It should read:

OUR COLLEGES SUCK!

BTW, Ruiz "money order" PhD was from Rice University. He has several other "degrees".

Tobin is "la creme de la creme" with his Harvard MBA.

And you-know-who was our very first MBA prez.

[realitytrumpsbull]

How about all the people overseas who are
deliberately trying to wreck our economy so
they can just buy a good chunk of it outright?
9 trillion in debt didn't happen by accident.

[marko77]

Corporate CEO's are bloodsuckers (although they may flatter themselves by thinking they are "sharks") who are making millions for themselves and investors while turning America into a Third World Nation. And isn't this what all business schools, including Harvard, teach and promote these days?

[themodernleader]

In the past quarter century, the best brains in the Nation have not gone into business. The gross incompetence of American corporate management will attest to the truth of this assertion.
Where did all of America's talent end up? I don't know. But will you indulge me to venture a guess.
America's most talented and brightest parked themselves in America's declining universities. There they plot, intrigue and conspire for ever higher position and power.
Some of them created the curriculum and instruction for the once highly touted MBA. The graduates of this degree went into unregulated corporations, banks and governmental agencies believing that the sole mission was the fast buck; the only interest was the private profit, the public interest be damned.
The resulting private leadership has been fraud, corruption greed, treason and betrayal of the Republic which made all their opportunity possible.
The decline of American power and influence correlate with the institutionalization and influence of America's higher education. As education becomes ever more specialized, esoteric and professionalized, stagnating bureaucracies replace originality and democratic spontaneity. Changeless meritocracy sets in motion form over substance, rules over functions, sameness over dynamism, decline over advancement and development.
Worst of all, the university system is at the becken call of the most powerful: plutocracy, aristocracy of the Country. Don't count on any help from our owned Intellegentisa when the pressures against self government reach a crescendo. It is safe to assume that the University elite are for sale to the highest bidder for defining the truth for that tine and place.

[ErnestineBass]

IMO, this SHOULD BE one bloody LONG LIST.