The anti-servant leader

Or, how not to run an IT department. Isen.blog cites a CIO Magazine article which does a post-mortem on AT&T Wireless.

AT&T Wireless tried to outsource everything to save money, demoralized employees by not fessing up to rumours to impending layoffs, and bungled a critical system upgrade. AT&T Wireless was bought up for a song by Cingular last year.

Take a look at the CIO’s uh, unique brand of driving employees to success…or something:

Former employees say morale wasn’t helped by [AT&T Wireless’s CIO Christopher Corrado]’s first presentation to the IT group, in which they say he proclaimed, “Come in every day and expect to be fired.” Intended to inspire the troops to greater effort, the talk backfired, says another former employee. “We all came away saying, ‘Who is this arrogant jerk?'”

The comments are pretty amusing too, if depressing. Ex-employees regale tales of having their warnings and recommendations given less attention than those of contractors, having to train their H1-B replacements before they were terminated, and of Corrado having his Ferrari delivered to the company parking lot during layoffs.