It doesn't pay to lie

It seems he put down that he had a BS in accounting and computer science, when in fact he only had a BS in accounting.

Now, that might seem a weak reason to fire a CEO, especially for a company that has been going through very bad times lately, not to mention going through a number of CEOs (now four in the last 10 months).

It wasn’t really the inflating of the CV that did the guy in, but the cover-up that followed. When questioned by his board of directors, the now ex-CEO said his headhunter had added the non-existent degree, and he was not involved or aware of it.

Not true, responded the recruiter – here is an e-mail from the CEO when he was looking for the job, in which he attached his resume and claimed the degree in computer science which he did not, in fact, have.

Hmm, said the board of directors. You lied to us about your background, and then you lied to us about lying to us. Let us think about this for a minute…

You’re fired.

In the end, it wasn’t the resume lying that did the guy in, it was the lying about it or, in other words, the cover-up.

For people of my generation, “cover-up” always reminds us of Richard Nixon and Watergate. Most people at the time would have accepted the president of the United States ordering a break in of the campaign offices of his Democratic opponent (offices in the Watergate Apartment and Office Building in Washington, DC), but no one could accept his lying about it. When the president was found, on tape, to be masterminding the Watergate break-in cover-up, he was gone. (A usually intelligent man, Richard Nixon bugged his own office, and then held meetings in it in which he himself was recorded as ordering illegal activities). He became the first and only man to resign as president of the United States.

People quickly learned (well, most people, the now ex-CEO of Yahoo! didn’t learn anything we can suppose) that cover-ups were no good. A few years later, the Johnson and Johnson Company had a problem with their key product Tylenol. Instead of covering up the issue, they publicly announced a recall of all Tylenol products (at a cost of US$100m) and introduced a new product with a safety cap. The stock (and sales of Tylenol) soared. 

So what do we learn?

 

1 Don’t lie about things; don’t cover up mistakes, errors or failures.

When I started out in business, I was taught that making a mistake was the second worse thing I could do, lying about it was the worst.

I always used to instruct my direct reports to tell me the truth about everything, and to come to me immediately when there was a problem or a crisis. Then we could solve the problem or fix the crisis together. I never yelled at anyone for making a mistake; I only got upset if they tried to hide it from me. 

This creates problems sometimes in the Asian context, as there is a cultural bias against giving bad news. People would much rather lie than be the bearer of ill tidings. This cultural bias is hard to fight against, but eventually positive as well as negative examples usually do the trick.

 

2 Everything is on the record

In today’s Internet age, there is nothing that can’t be found out quickly. Everything is accessible on the Web, and if it is not there, it might be found in your e-mails. Everything you do, every website you visit, every e-mail you send, is there forever. (You should know, if you don’t already, that hitting the “delete” button on your computer does NOT delete anything. It merely hides it.)

Every time you write an e-mail, think how you would feel if your a) boss, b) mother c) girlfriend or d) everyone in the world would read it. Because that is a very real possibility. Every lie you tell is on the record forever. Every nasty or rude e-mail you send…there forever.

A friend of mine was having a contract dispute with his company, and wrote an impassioned four-page e-mail defending himself and attacking his employer. He sent it to key people at his company, and then he shared it with me. I called it his “resignation novel”. A week later he was fired. Not for doing a bad job, mind you, but for writing an inflammatory e-mail. I told him, the next time he had the urge to write something like that, to send it to me first so I could tell him to discard it.

So, only two lessons for today. Don’t lie; and watch everything you write down. Those are two career killers.

 

Quiz: Does anyone know the origin of the word “Yahoo”? The first one to send me the correct answer will get a mention in next month’s column.

 

Eric Rosenkranz (www.ethree-asia.com) runs a strategic advisory which created the Internet and helped develop Facebook. He also has a degree in computer science.

 

Follow his “Creating Success” series in this Hi! Managers column every fourth Friday of the month.