Situational Ethics
What is it about being the CEO of a large company that leads people into situations like Craig Conway’s? fired from PeopleSoft (but still on the board of directors) because of “misleading statements” that could have gotten his company into more trouble than it already faced from Oracle, the takeover conflagration he wanted to douse has just gotten worse. It’s all a game of manipulating the stock price, which is exactly what gets most CEO’s into trouble, and it’s been going on for a very long time now, revealing the power of the investment banks and brokerage houses over how businesses are run. But look, if you’re not paying your executives with options, you don’t need a constantly rising stock price. Slow, steady growth is what the stock market is all about: long-term investment; and that’s good for the company itself in the first place. Business isn’t about how much your paper’s worth, but how much your product is worth. PeopleSoft’s product line is arguably the best of its kind. Oracle and SAP are notoriously harder to implement and maintain. Now PeopleSoft appears to need a third party to step in and buy them out in order to avoid a hostile merger with Oracle. This puts a lot of people in jeopardy: customers and employees alike. And all because Conway “misspoke.”