The Story

For the past six months, Harris Tetley, the CEO at Randolph Plywood has accomplished the following all by himself:  arbitrary firings, management meetings held in the most expensive resort hotels, systematic harassment of union stewards, falsification of sales and production figures and temper tantrums at the expense of the Randolph Executive Team. He was the direct cause of a strike which dragged on for two months. And yet, Randolph wasn’t what you would call a huge firm, with only some 283 employees, most of them working on the shop floor.

Every morning, Mr. Tetley would leave his newly-appointed “Executive Suite” to visit the plant. There, he watched employees working at their various jobs of stripping birch logs, operating chip board presses or trimming and sanding 4 X 8 sheets of varying thicknesses of high quality plywood. He staggered his visits and timing so that the employees never knew if or when they would be subjected to his observation. His observation technique was described by the union as “hovering”, standing over employees in critical silence, with his hands clenched behind his back.

Recently, Randolph spent over $800,000 buying out employees who were arbitrarily dismissed by Tetley for what he perceived was low productivity. The company was being sued by two of these employees for wrongful dismissal. Rumours were spreading that the company was in economic trouble and was ripe for some kind of corporate raid.

Harris Tetley lost credibility with clients as well; he was known to yell at customers if he felt that they were being “unreasonable”. Meanwhile, on the shop floor, employees were openly griping that Randolph wasn’t a good place to work anymore and that the “little man in the corner office” had to go. Most workers were looking for another job in a tight economy.