Corporate governance: The doofus factor

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Corporate governance





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THE directors of Yahoo! were “so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country” that they fired Carol Bartz as chief executive “to show that they're not the doofuses that they are.” That was Ms Bartz's typically blunt verdict, offered to Fortune after she was dismissed with a phone call by the internet firm's chairman, Roy Bostock, on September 6th.
She would say that. Yet Ms Bartz's criticisms of the board have been sympathetically received. Firing a chief executive by phone smacks of hasty, panicky decision-making. And Yahoo!'s board already had a poor reputation, having turned down an offer from Microsoft that valued the firm at several times what it is worth today.
It is not just Yahoo!'s board that is feeling the heat. The directors of HP, another stumbling Silicon Valley giant, have been accused of serial ineptitude spanning the appointment and dismissal of Carly Fiorina as chief executive, the ...