Posted by: Janet Schlarbaum

By Lance Winslow

When Elliot Spitzer put his sites on Hank Greenberg of AIG a few years ago, he was attempting to punish the company for working within the industry to get failing insurance companies to specialize in the regions they knew the best and understood. The former Attorneys General and eventually Governor called for Anti-Trust Violations and forced Hank Greenberg out of the company.

Next, AIG hired a new team, that team went on to make very bad choices and insured deals for investment banks and became an enabler to much of the manipulation. One Human Resource consultant said it best when he wrote an article for Human Resource Executive Online where he asks are there any “HR Lessons from Investment Banking?” He goes on to state:

Extraordinarily callous and inept management, combined with huge rewards for success and incentives for hiding failure, are some of the typical attitudes exhibited by financial institutions, many of which have been collapsing. HR leaders should understand the dynamics of such meltdowns in order to avoid such a fate in their own organizations.”

One can only wonder that if human resource directors do their jobs to the utmost and are not over ridden by executives hiring their friends if in the future those who lack integrity may never get hired in the first place. Indeed, I guarantee Hank Greenberg who built AIG into the giant that it is today, would have never allowed the company to back such weak deals. But with Hank Greenberg out and new executives in, no one should be surprised at the final outcome.