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      The Nation’s Worst CEOs

      …… grab headlines for soaring…… or sordid crimes, but rarely for wretched……. Here are two who’ve run great companies into the ground.

      In the late 1990s, investors deified corporate chief executives. In the early 2000s……..were vilified. And now, it seems, they are pretty much ignored – seldom appearing on financial television programs or news magazine covers anymore unless they’re in handcuffs. They are the forgotten souls of Wall Street’s……… machine.

      But that doesn’t mean that the overpaid and……….. executives aren’t making as many bad……… as ever. It simply means that we’ve gotten complacent about the hardships they cause shareholders when they…….. bad strategies, bad communications, bad hiring, bad products and bad marketing – and then blame their problems on the weather, world politics or traders.

      AT&T’s David Dorman. Let’s start with David W. Dorman of AT&T. Though he inherited a junkyard dog of a company from the………. prior chief executive, C. Michael Armstrong, he hasn’t done a thing to improve Ma Bell in the past two years. With such an immensely well-known…… name and legendary………, you would think that Dorman could make his company synonymous with the global growth of networking as a way of life.

      Yet he appears to be pushing the company ever deeper into the background……its wireless business in an expensive deal with Sprint, losing the……. on broadband services to the more aggressive Baby Bells, making its long-distance plans more ridiculously complex than ever, experimenting with a high-quality-but-high-cost enterprise strategy, and pursuing Internet-based telephony too slowly and timidly.

      Since Dorman has taken the reins, the…… of AT&T……. have sunk about 60%. The stock’s 5.8% dividend is a nice start of a……… but Dorman needs to find a way to grow the business……. have been down every year since 2000, and earnings-growth……. are negative.

      Oracle’s Larry Ellison. No major technology company’s chief executive has put his……… through more pain than Larry Ellison at Oracle in the past four years. Oracle shares are down 72% from the March 2000 high, about twice as much as Dell and about half again as much as Microsoft. And while most of Ellison’s………. have found a way to make shares grow over the past 12 months, Oracle is still stuck in a rut.

      Part of the problem at Oracle is that the company did so well for so long at getting its databases into Fortune 500 companies that there is little room for major business……… With so few major………. left in the world, it will be difficult for Oracle to grow much faster than the global economy. But Ellison’s personality is another major part of the problem. His combative……….. to business with partners and competitors alike has turned off investors. His attempt at………. of PeopleSoft has justified their distrust of his instincts.

      Mark Anderson, hedge fund manager, complains that Ellison «is so predatory – it’s as though he cannot control himself.» Anderson says that Ellison would grow………… more appropriately if he were more creative than rapacious. The PeopleSoft………., in Anderson’s view, is a…….. to «buy seats» for Oracle database software by purchasing and shutting down a………. It will probably……, and, in the meantime, it has been a costly distraction.

      Ellison would do much better by his shareholders if he would……. an initiative to build communications more effectively into the world of database applications. The chief executive understood the power of the Internet early and rode the online…….. brilliantly in the late 1990s. But since then he was unable to find a……. for his company in a broader…….. play that will carry it into the next decade.

      With that……., he has doomed his company to……. revenue growth and a stagnant……. Database software, after all, is a business that will never go away and gets deeply embedded in clients’ way of doing business. Once you have customers, «you pretty much need to shoot both their dogs before they’ll leave you,» is Anderson’s colorful phrase. But Wall Street demands more than……. With moderating sales, he’s got to do more than try to smother the…….. and……..

      Source: www.msn.com