Bosses From Hell

By Joel Stein

Having a mean, stupid boss is part of the fun of working. It's what bonds you to your fellow employees, even your fellow Americans. Who wants to be the guy at the bar who pipes up with "Actually, my boss brings me a bear claw and a mochachino every morning"?

In the days of real industrial titans like Henry Clay Frick, recalcitrant employees could simply be killed, as they were by Frick's actions during the Homestead strike. Or spied on in their homes, as they were by Henry Ford. What good is having power if you can't abuse it?

But by the middle of the century, bosses had to be more clever, if not more subtle. Armand Hammer, whose business career lasted nearly the entire century, required many on Occidental Petroleum's board of directors--most of whom were employees--to give him signed, undated resignation letters that he could use if they tried to vote against him. His closest employees, according to one biographer, formed the Occidental Mouseketeers--with official membership drawings of a cowering mouse on a red carpet. But they weren't as beaten as the ITT execs of the 1960s and '70s, who were regularly grilled and even sickened in large meetings with CEO Harold Geneen.

By the '80s, the imperious CEO began to pride himself on scaring his employees. When Dick Snyder was president of Simon & Schuster, ear protection became a recommended piece of executive equipment. The intensity of Snyder's verbal assaults would surprise even him--but surprise did not stop him. Snyder met his match in the equally fearsome Martin Davis, who became CEO of Simon & Schuster's parent company, Gulf + Western. Meanwhile in the Bronx, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner was taking delight in firing people. He is so paradigmatic of impetuous power (throwing tantrums, bad-mouthing employees in the press, hiring a spy to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield) that he's simply called the Boss--and not in a hip, Bruce Springsteen way.

Wall Street's favorite boss today is the power tool who can shred humanity like an old memo to "create value." GE's Jack Welch, soon after becoming CEO, earned the label "Neutron Jack" for closing plants and laying off workers. He's a prince compared to "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. A West Point graduate and former paratrooper, Dunlap struck like Sherman and crowed about it. At Lily Tulip he fired 50% of the corporate office; at Crown-Zellerbach, 20% of the work force; at Scott Paper, 11,000 employees. After firing 6,000 at Sunbeam, Chainsaw himself got axed by a pair of fire-breathing shareholders: Ronald Perelman, never mistaken for Mr. Congeniality, and Michael Price, a.k.a. the "scariest s.o.b. on Wall Street"--at least to CEOs.

Few of the candidates for cruel bosses were women, mostly because so few bosses are women. But Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean, played evil stepmom to all the employees of her husband, New York City real estate mogul Harry Helmsley. She fired employees at a whim (one for taking an apple from the kitchen while working through lunch) and had that rich-person disease of being paranoid that everyone was stealing from her; meanwhile, she was convicted of tax evasion. Even one of her lawyers called her a "tough bitch."

In truth, it's the guys who run lousy companies who really wear the black hats. When Frank Lorenzo took over Eastern Air Lines, the animosity that developed between him and union bosses grew so great that it hastened the carrier's demise. He was so vilified that he once defended his reputation by saying that he did not eat children for breakfast. On the other hand, Robert Crandall, the recently retired chairman of moneymaking American Airlines, draws effusive praise for being a hard-ass. A chain-smoking, incessant curser, Crandall called weekend meetings so often that execs' wives drew straws to see who would ask him to let up. Like all mean bosses, he had nicknames--"Darth Vader" and "Fang" among them.

But bosses have often been unbearable and will continue to be. "The caveman who sat around the fire and picked up the stick and hit the other guys on the head became the leader, and things haven't really changed," explains Stanley Bing, author of Crazy Bosses: Spotting Them, Serving Them, Surviving Them. "The really great bosses are not really great human beings. Gandhi was a terrible boss."

--By Joel Stein