Mindset : The New Psychology of Success pdfdrive com

Two Geniuses Collide
Resident geniuses almost brought down AOL and Time Warner, too. Steve Case
of AOL and Jerry Levin of Time Warner were two CEOs with the fixed mindset
who merged their companies. Can you see it coming?
Case  and  Levin  had  a  lot  in  common.  Both  of  them  cultivated  an  aura  of
supreme  intelligence.  Both  tried  to  intimidate  people  with  their  brilliance.  And
both were known to take more credit than they deserved. As resident geniuses,
neither  wanted  to  hear  complaints,  and  both  were  ready  to  fire  people  who
weren’t  “team  players,”  meaning  people  who  wouldn’t  keep  up  the  façade  that
they had erected.
When the merger actually took place, AOL was in such debt that the merged
company  was  on  the  brink  of  ruin.  You  would  think  that  the  two  CEOs  might
work  together,  marshaling  their  resources  to  save  the  company  they  created.
Instead, Levin and Case scrambled for personal power.
Levin was the first to fall. But Case was still not trying to make things work.

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In  fact,  when  the  new  CEO,  Richard  Parsons,  sent  someone  down  to  fix  AOL,
Case was intensely against it. If someone else fixed AOL, someone else would
get  the  credit.  As  with  Iacocca,  better  to  let  the  company  collapse  than  let
another prince be crowned. When Case was finally counseled to resign, he was
furious.  Like  Iacocca,  he  denied  all  responsibility  for  the  company’s  problems
and vowed to get back at those who had turned against him.
Because  of  the  resident  geniuses,  AOL  Time  Warner  ended  the  year  2002
with a loss of almost one hundred billion dollars. It was the largest yearly loss in
American history.