Tony Deyal, Contributor
"There are more pompous, arrogant, self-centred mediocre people running corporate America. Their judgements and misjudgements have made me rich."
THIS WAS the verdict of Joseph D. Jamail Jr. after winning a US$10.5 billion settlement with interest for Pennzoil against Texaco in 1985. Jamail Jr. obtained the first million-dollar judgement against General Motors Corporation. He has since added seventy or more victories of equal or greater value. He negotiated the largest single settlement ever for one person for John Coates versus Remington. This settlement resulted in the recall of thousands of Remington rifles and is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records.
On the other had, a 16-year old lawsuit against Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, brought by 165,000 people who had paid $1,000 each to stay at a resort that was never built, was settled in favour of the plaintiffs. Their lawyers received US$2.5 million. The people who lost their $1,000 ended up with $6.54 each.
However, lawyers included, Jamail's contention is supported by what Business 2.0 Magazine describes as "corporate buffoonery" ranging from plain dumb to possibly criminal. Recently Business ran its 101 Dumbest Moments of 2003. One that is very interesting comes from General Motors (GM) Canada.
NEW NAME
The company introduced its Buick LaCrosse sedan in Canada and then had to quickly withdraw it until it came up with a new name. 'Crosse' is a slang term in Quebec for 'masturbation'. Ironically, a former Head of GM,
Charlies 'Engine Charlie' Harris once proudly proclaimed, "What's good for General Motors is good for America." Good for GM too, I would think, although it might cause fungus growth on their exhaust pipes.
Not to be outdone, Ikea the giant Swedish furniture company, explained that a children's bunk bed on their inventory was named 'Gutvik' after a tiny town in Sweden. This was necessary because Germans use a word that sounds like 'vik' to mean 'sexual intercourse'. 'Gut' sounds like the German word for 'good'. Put it together with a children's bunk bed and it becomes good sexual intercourse, although given the choice of venue, it might veer towards either the kinky or the extremely uncomfortable, although preferable to business on the rocks.
This is what happened to the Chamber of Commerce of a small city called La Grange in North Carolina. The Chamber of Commerce presented its "Small Business of the Year" to Herring's Grill. The only problem was that the award winning company had closed two months earlier.
Fortunately for Red Lobster, the seafood chain, it is bigger than Herring's. In what seemed like an 'unshelfish' move, in June 2003 the company unveiled its new promotion the bottomless bucket of crab. In September the parent company announced a five-percent drop in earnings from Red Lobster. The reason was the 'bottomless' promotion. As the company's CEO said, "It wasn't the second helping on all-you-can-eat but the third." Really it was all about America's growing bottom line.
However, the crab was not as finger-licking good as KFC chicken. The company did not look so good when they took a licking from consumer groups. Colonel Sanders and his boys were forced to pull some ads which tried to reposition fried chicken as a health food. According to KFC's Vice President for Marketing and Food Innovation, Scott Bergren, "Consumers will be surprised to learn they can enjoy fried chicken as part of a healthy balanced diet." They really were surprised. The advertised bucket contained 3.090 fat calories. The double standards that have always been inherent in American business practices now seem to be either getting worse or getting found out.
LAWSUIT
In November Kmart creditors filed a lawsuit against six of the company's former executives including Chuck Conaway, chairman and CEO. Conaway had billed Kmart over US$106,000 for improvements to his home. The bankruptcy filing caused the closure of 600 stores and the firing of 57,000 employees. Michael Sears, Chief Financial Officer of Boeing, was also fired together with Vice President, Darleen Druyun. An internal investigation revealed that Sears lobbied to hire Druyun while she worked for the US Air Force with whom Boeing was negotiating a US$21 billion contract. And just as Boeing's CEO, Phil Condit resigned, reviewers were receiving a book on ethical business management entitled, Soaring Through Turbulence: A New Model for Managers Who Want to Succeed in a Changing Business World. The author- Michael Sears.
But if you really want to know about American Business practices, this one gets the Martha Stewart prize. A Pakistani woman doing cut-rate clerical work for the University of California at San Francisco Medical Centre threatened to post patients' confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid money they owed her. According to Business 2.0, the lady, Lubna Baloch, said she had not been paid the three cents per line promised by Tom Spires, a Texan, who got the assignment from Sonya Newburn, a Florida woman, who got the transcription job from Transcription Stat, a firm in Sausalito, California, that contracted USCF's records for 18 cents a line. Now if you believe the line about how good it will be to have American businesses here under the Free Trade Area of the Americas, you deserve to have your head examined by Homeland Security the same way they examine your luggage.
Tony Deyal was last seen in Texas in a line behind some famous ballplayers and athletes examining a 'whizzinator', an artificial penis that dispenses fake urine to fool urinalysis. The owner of the device, who also sells dried urine, says, "How people choose to use it is beyond our control."
