Best Buy is investigating whether former chief executive Brian Dunn misused company assets during an alleged relationship with a female employee, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday night.
Shagging a bird in the training department isn\’t really the sort of crime that gets UK CEOs fired. No one seemed all that worried about Fred the Shred doing it for example.
But the septics do seem to have a history of doing this: The Boeing bloke lost his job for very much the same reason. All rather Puritan really.
They do tend to have corporate policies banning people from having relationships with co-workers. Which policies we, as sophisticated degenerates, might think a bit silly. But what he’s actually being sacked for is a breach of company rules. Now, you may not normally see CEOs over here getting the sack for that unless it is financial or market abuse but it does happen.
But, when in Rome …
When, many years ago, I started my own business I received only one bit of advice from my father – who had, for a long time, run his own business very successfully – “Don’t poke the payroll”…
Saves an awful lot of “bother”.. 🙂
“misused company assets”: wot, desk abuse?
You mean a 29-year old fancied that walrus?? There’s hope for you yet Tim…
He was using the Besy Buy trade in option
Being sacked for misusing a company desk for something it wasn’t designed for is a result of the puritans leaving England all those years ago. 😉
At least there’s some hope – Santorum is out of the presidential race.
Surely, under a hypothetical Santorum regime, he would only have been sacked for using contraception?
The accusation is not poking the help but misusing the company’s assets. If he was taking a little Minx to dinner and charging the company, isn’t that a sackable offense? If he was taking some little strumpet to Cancun on my corporate dime I would hope he was fired.
Rich men are entitled to impress and bang young and stupid women. But it is an agency problem if they are using their company’s assets to impress said women. If people aren’t fired for that in the UK, so much the worse for UK corporate governance.
This is why stock options are a good idea. So the management will use corporate assets to further the company’s goals and not their pecker’s.
He chose the wrong state. BB is Minnesota, which is v strong on honesty, execs included.
Not quite right. He’s already been sacked. For the in-company nookie. They’re now looking at a further investigation to see whether he’s done anything illegal.
If you have looked at sexual harassment laws in the US, you would realise the extent to which he was leaving the company wide open to a massive lawsuit unless he either greased her way up the company ladder or managed to pay her off once the affair was over. I’d fire such a selfish ass for displaying such poor judgement.
Donavon… which rather begs the question.
The point is, laws in America are fruitloop. Hence, a CEO in the UK dealing with a UK worker would have been fine, and Tim’s point stands.
Yes, a CEO of a UK company would do well not to bang his/her American employees. This is rather like the more general rule of “don’t do any dealing with that scumbag country ever, because they’ll probably steal all of your money and get you deported to a federal prison”.