Detail-obsessed CEO misses the big picture

Our chief preferred to micro-manage the small stuff than deal with substantive issues

My subsequent first-round interview meeting with the CEO and her management team went very well. A week later while en route to a client, I received a frantic call from my wife. Apparently, the CEO had been calling my house trying to locate me. The CEO sounded anxious, demanding to be put in touch with me immediately. So, I called the CEO directly and she asked how soon I could meet with the interview team again. As the CEO put it, what exact time could I be over at her office, that day?

Wow, I thought. Was an offer on the table?

That was my first taste of this CEO’s over-reactive, micro-managing style. After that second interview, she asked if I would consider a different role in their firm, that of managing their distribution facility in New Jersey. I was a little disappointed about not getting the CIO role (they indicated that they found someone with Six Sigma experience), but the salary offer was very good so I took it.

The first day I started work, I was given an employee handbook that contained every conceivable rule and regulation, from code of ethics to PC software policy to code of business conduct to desk plaques. Not so unusual, really, except that the list went on and on and covered 19 different areas, each one with its own acknowledgment page where I had to sign indicating I had read and agreed to the particular rule or regulation.

I started to see more evidence of the company’s need to control and monitor employees when I got a load of the special access card system that required us all to swipe in to arrive and swipe out when we left the main door. If you swiped in when arriving in the morning and later in the day, say at lunchtime with a group of friends, each one of you would have to swipe out. If you just walked out with the group without swiping your card but swipe it later when you returned from lunch, the system would not allow you to enter.

The handbook stated that if you arrived at work between 9:01 a.m. and 9:15 a.m., you would be considered late. Three lates in a quarter and you were charged a half-day of personal time. If you arrived between 9:15 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., you were charged a half-day of personal time. If you arrived after 12:30 p.m., you were charged one full personal day. I was beginning to understand the reason for the swipe card system.

The CEO decreed that any picture frames on desks had to be approved by her as well as HR. Desks had to be cleared of all paperwork at the end of each work day. Nothing was to be placed under the desk. The CEO ruled no one could eat at their desk and that water was the only beverage that could be consumed at the desk. If you owed the CEO a memo, her administrative assistant would hound you to death, even before it was due. People walked the halls in fear of the CEO. She even decreed that no printer supplies (including toner cartridges) could be purchased without her signature. PC technicians from the New York City office could not visit my New Jersey facility for repair calls without her permission (she didn’t want to pay for cab fare through the Lincoln Tunnel). Her business continuity plan was a telephone-size thick book that mainly listed phone numbers and where to find blankets and flashlights in file cabinets. Yet, her datacenter at my New Jersey facility had inadequate UPS protect, a SAN with a bad drive, a room full of unplugged mainframes and water and fire detectors that didn’t work. Backup tapes were stored in plastic boxes in a hot storeroom.

I tried to bring the datacenter issues to executive management’s attention, but they deemed it “outside” my area of responsibility. Instead, I was told to concentrate on reducing mailing costs. After several months, I had enough of this mess and left.

I found all of this small-minded attention to cost-saving perplexing until I learned that the CEO had once discovered that the former CIO and the manager of her New Jersey facility had been stealing from the company. As a result of that incident, other employees told me she became a very paranoid person and micro-managed everybody because she trusted no-one.

And maybe the penny pinching served a purpose, too. Revenues for the firm are down for 2007, but the CEOs 2007 total executive compensation was more than $957,000. Her CFO’s compensation was only $206,000. And yet, according to the recent 10-K files with the SEC, as of April 30, 2007, total operating revenue was just over $83.6 million.

I’m sure it’s not enough for her, though. Shes probably still imagining what those figures could have been if I’d done more to reduce mailing costs.