"I expected results"
About this Quote
“I expected results” is corporate minimalism with a steel-toed boot inside it. Bernie Ebbers doesn’t say “I asked,” “I hoped,” or even “we planned.” He chooses a verb that implies entitlement, not effort. The line compresses an entire management worldview into three words: outcomes are owed, and whoever fails to deliver them has not just underperformed but broken an unstated contract.
Coming from Ebbers, the former WorldCom CEO whose empire collapsed in one of the era’s defining accounting scandals, the subtext turns darker. “Results” in late-’90s telecom wasn’t a neutral metric; it was a market religion. Analysts demanded perpetual growth, stock prices became the real scoreboard, and executives were rewarded for meeting expectations even when the underlying business couldn’t. In that climate, “I expected results” reads less like a performance standard and more like a pressure system: the boss’s appetite becomes the company’s operating principle.
The genius - and menace - of the phrase is how it launders responsibility. It frames the speaker as a rational adult surrounded by disappointments, not a participant in the incentives that make corners get cut. It’s also a classic hierarchy move: “results” are measurable; ethics, sustainability, and reality are inconveniently fuzzy. Ebbers’ context makes the line feel like an accidental confession of the era’s executive id: when expectation hardens into necessity, numbers stop being reports and start becoming targets.
Coming from Ebbers, the former WorldCom CEO whose empire collapsed in one of the era’s defining accounting scandals, the subtext turns darker. “Results” in late-’90s telecom wasn’t a neutral metric; it was a market religion. Analysts demanded perpetual growth, stock prices became the real scoreboard, and executives were rewarded for meeting expectations even when the underlying business couldn’t. In that climate, “I expected results” reads less like a performance standard and more like a pressure system: the boss’s appetite becomes the company’s operating principle.
The genius - and menace - of the phrase is how it launders responsibility. It frames the speaker as a rational adult surrounded by disappointments, not a participant in the incentives that make corners get cut. It’s also a classic hierarchy move: “results” are measurable; ethics, sustainability, and reality are inconveniently fuzzy. Ebbers’ context makes the line feel like an accidental confession of the era’s executive id: when expectation hardens into necessity, numbers stop being reports and start becoming targets.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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