Sept. 3, 2008.

People who’ve read my book One Foot Out the Door may recall my nominee for the stupidest executive I’ve ever met.  He was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company who, in our first – and last – meeting grabbed my left upper arm, moved his face within an inch of mine and hissed, I want to kill them, I want to kill every single one of them and I want you to deliver that message. He was talking about his employees.

What a sweetheart he was!

I left headquarters dying to work for him.

United Airline is consistently near the bottom rank among U.S. airlines in customer satisfaction.  That may explain why in August 2008, United posted a $2.7 Billion quarterly loss, a sum that was larger than the losses of American, Continental and Delta combined.

United supplanted that Fortune 500 CEO and became my new nominee for gold when, in addition to lousy service in a competitive industry where customers do have choices, the executives of United decided on an adversarial relationship with their pilots – their pilots!  I would not be surprised if mechanics are next.  Those skies are seriously Unfriendly.  You can fly United but count me out.

Well, I now have a new contender for the medal:  On March 28, 2007 Circuit City  announced that it was going to lay-off about 3,400 employees.  In itself, that is not news.  It’s also not news that the reason for the layoffs was to cut costs and increase profits.  We’ve all seen this before. 

Nor was it news that the planned layoffs were of their full-time, more experienced and successful sales people who not only sold the most but were also a primary source of training for new employees.  Their sin was they earned $14-15 an hour and new hires got about $9.  This is still not headline material but definitely puts Circuit City in the race as their competitive advantage was supposed to be their knowledgeable salespeople.

The truly newsworthy part of Circuit City’s plan, and the twist that earns them the gold was they were willing to rehire their laid-off senior salespeople at the lower wage of a new hire.  Now that’s stupid.

How might those rehires act given that they would not be brimming over with love and gratitude to CC?  Let me count the ways:  they might steal merchandise or ignore thefts made by others; they might bait and switch or flat out lie to customers saying they had run out of an item the customer wanted; they could recommend other stores to eager buyers; they could hard sell expensive inferior products…The acts of business sabotage by Actively Disengaged employees is limited only by a lack of imagination.

Circuit City managed to kill any existing employee Commitment or Engagement and replace those positive feelings with the very negative Active Disengagement which motivates employees to do harm to the company. 

Sometimes stupidity reflects egotism, narcissism, hubris and greed.  No surprise, then, that CC’s sales fell and the stock price plummeted.

But sometimes stupidity results from ignorance.

I’ve been shocked over the last three to four years by the near universal ignorance of executives and managers about the compelling financial relationship between levels of employee commitment and engagement and success.  In plainer words, the great majority of organizational decision makers do not know they will only succeed if they have their employee’s hearts, minds and guts.

As I see it, that makes the HR community’s Job #1 communicating these financial facts frequently, decisively and pointedly.