The Worst Bosses of 2012 – Manipulating Interest Rates, Seducing Colleagues, and Bribing Officials

Who are the absolute worst bosses of the past year? Professor Sydney Finkelstein believes he knows the answer to that question, writes Bloomberg Businessweek.

 Finkelstein, a long-time lecturer at the Dartmouth School of Business and author of 11 books on management, is very adept at recognizing ultimate failure, which is why he has compiled a list of the five worst directors in the United States this year.

This list has been compiled for the third consecutive year, and in the past, it has included the directors of Netflix, Research in Motion, and HP. This year, the title of the worst goes to Brian Dunn, who resigned from his position as CEO of Best Buy during the year. His downfall was due to an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with a significantly younger employee of the company. However, in addition to the scandal, his position was undermined by catastrophic company management – following a massive drop in sales and stock value, Dunn opted to buy back his own shares from the market, costing the company no less than six billion dollars.

In second place is Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy, who devastated the company’s balance sheet. According to Reuters, he approved non-purpose loans worth one billion dollars to various companies and individuals over the past three years. Additionally, he established a company hedge fund into which he poured an additional 200 million dollars. His position as the second worst director was secured by his private use of the company’s aircraft and signing multi-million dollar sponsorship contracts for the Oklahoma basketball team.

Third place went to Avon’s CEO, Andrea Jung, who failed to address the company’s operational issues and rejected a takeover offer worth 10 billion dollars. The offer from competitor Coty was supposed to save Avon, whose market value has fallen from 21 billion to just six billion dollars since 2004. Jung will also be remembered for spending 300 million dollars on lawyers in an attempt to cover up her bribery of foreign officials.

The fourth worst director is Mark Pincus, the head of Zynga. Zynga, a mobile game development company known for Farmville, lost 75 percent of its market value last year. Such a catastrophic decline could have been easily avoided, but Pincus made the mistake of tying his company exclusively to Facebook, which had its worst year in history. Last on the list is Rodrigo Rato, the director of the Spanish Bankia. Thanks to his creative accounting, manipulation of interest rates and exchange rates, and other malpractices, Bankia faced a spectacular collapse, surviving only due to taxpayer money.

Although he did not place him on the list, Finkelstein could not help but mention Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg.

– “At a time when his stocks are going in only one direction, Zuckerberg continues to nurture only his enormous ego. I better not even mention his obsession with hooded sweatshirts,” concludes Finkelstein.

As a worthy mention, Finkelstein adds Andrew Mason, the CEO of Groupon, explaining that no one in the public thinks he is capable of leading such a company.