"We were a fast-growing company, and I was a demanding boss"
About this Quote
A tidy little sentence that tries to launder a legend. “Fast-growing company” is the prestige wrapper; “demanding boss” is the moral alibi. Bernie Ebbers offers both in a single breath, framing himself as the kind of hard-charging executive American business culture is trained to forgive. Growth becomes a force of nature, and harshness becomes the necessary weather that comes with it.
The intent is defensive, but not overtly apologetic. Ebbers doesn’t say “pressured,” “cornered,” or “wrong.” He picks a corporate virtue (“fast-growing”) and a managerial trait (“demanding”) that reads as normal, even admirable, in the mythology of late-1990s capitalism. It’s the language of boardrooms and business profiles: scale, urgency, intensity. If people got hurt, the implication goes, that’s what happens when you’re building something big.
The subtext is sharper: demanding of whom, to do what, and toward what ends? In the WorldCom era, “demanding” often meant demanding numbers - quarter after quarter - in a market that rewarded the appearance of momentum more than the reality of it. That context matters because Ebbers’ public story can’t be separated from the accounting fraud that helped inflate WorldCom’s performance and from the broader dot-com-and-telecom boom that treated skepticism as sabotage.
What makes the line work is its strategic vagueness. It invites listeners to fill in the blanks with familiar tropes of ambition and toughness, not with auditors, balance sheets, and the human costs of collapse. It’s reputational triage: recast a crisis of integrity as a personality quirk in a success story.
The intent is defensive, but not overtly apologetic. Ebbers doesn’t say “pressured,” “cornered,” or “wrong.” He picks a corporate virtue (“fast-growing”) and a managerial trait (“demanding”) that reads as normal, even admirable, in the mythology of late-1990s capitalism. It’s the language of boardrooms and business profiles: scale, urgency, intensity. If people got hurt, the implication goes, that’s what happens when you’re building something big.
The subtext is sharper: demanding of whom, to do what, and toward what ends? In the WorldCom era, “demanding” often meant demanding numbers - quarter after quarter - in a market that rewarded the appearance of momentum more than the reality of it. That context matters because Ebbers’ public story can’t be separated from the accounting fraud that helped inflate WorldCom’s performance and from the broader dot-com-and-telecom boom that treated skepticism as sabotage.
What makes the line work is its strategic vagueness. It invites listeners to fill in the blanks with familiar tropes of ambition and toughness, not with auditors, balance sheets, and the human costs of collapse. It’s reputational triage: recast a crisis of integrity as a personality quirk in a success story.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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