What really gets me isn’t just that George Shaheen continued to collect money from Webvan, apparently until 2019 if LinkedIn is to be believed. It’s that so many other companies rushed to get him on their boards. Gee, it’s like basic competence has absolutely no connection to executive success…
You're so right. His career is astonishingly checkered. Here's a snippet, dripping with hindsight irony, from Forbes, in March 1999:
"The globe is littered with companies that didn't make it," warns Andersen's managing partner and chief executive, George Shaheen, preaching apocalypse. "The changes coming in the next ten years threaten everyone -- including us."
Shaheen says, ominously, that only one in three chief executives of multinationals fully understands how this revolution will roil the future. Only one in ten has a clue about e-commerce, another top Andersen partner says. And the rest? "They're scared to death," Shaheen says. His unspoken point: You can avoid getting left out in the uneven distribution of the future -- if you hire us and do what we tell you.
After the Andersen depredations at FoxPro and before Enron. This was the man responsible for the renaming of Andersen Consulting to Accenture to minimize the name poisoning.
It was really convenient wasn't it! Visiting their warehouse was pretty astonishing--they also sold booze, and even had a cigar humidor! But also, it seemed kind of impossible to make it work as a business.
What really gets me isn’t just that George Shaheen continued to collect money from Webvan, apparently until 2019 if LinkedIn is to be believed. It’s that so many other companies rushed to get him on their boards. Gee, it’s like basic competence has absolutely no connection to executive success…
You're so right. His career is astonishingly checkered. Here's a snippet, dripping with hindsight irony, from Forbes, in March 1999:
"The globe is littered with companies that didn't make it," warns Andersen's managing partner and chief executive, George Shaheen, preaching apocalypse. "The changes coming in the next ten years threaten everyone -- including us."
Shaheen says, ominously, that only one in three chief executives of multinationals fully understands how this revolution will roil the future. Only one in ten has a clue about e-commerce, another top Andersen partner says. And the rest? "They're scared to death," Shaheen says. His unspoken point: You can avoid getting left out in the uneven distribution of the future -- if you hire us and do what we tell you.
After the Andersen depredations at FoxPro and before Enron. This was the man responsible for the renaming of Andersen Consulting to Accenture to minimize the name poisoning.
I loved Webvan and was so sorry to see them fold. Every other house on my street had a yellow Webvan bin on their porch. It was awesome.
It was really convenient wasn't it! Visiting their warehouse was pretty astonishing--they also sold booze, and even had a cigar humidor! But also, it seemed kind of impossible to make it work as a business.