The majority of folks who’d recently been forced to resign their high paying CEO position in the midst of a sexual harassment controversy would probably still be looking for work a month later. Not Mark Hurd.

Hurd, who last month was forced to resign from his CEO position with Hewlett-Packard, will be joining Oracle Corp., the world’s second largest software company, as president and board member. In August, Hurd was forced out by HP’s board after he settled charges of sexual harassment brought by a marketing consultant. Although both Hurd and the consultant, Jodie Fisher, denied having a sexual relationship, and the HP investigation didn’t find any evidence of sexual wrongdoing, Hurd was forced to resign anyway. HP maintains that the resignation was a result of Hurd falsifying expense reports in what they saw as an attempt to cover up the relationship.

Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison believes HP made a huge mistake letting Hurd go. Writing to the New York Times, Ellison said “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”

I suppose there are always two sides to every argument. Since HP never found any evidence of sexual misconduct then his dismissal surrounding those charges could be called into question. On the other hand, if a lowly sales person had been caught doctoring expense reports, she/he would probably have been given the boot too. But that’s where the similarities end. It would probably take our sales person a little longer than a month to find another job. And something tells me it wouldn’t be anything along the lines of president.

Read more about Oracle’s new hire at Businessweek.

The really bad rap label CEO and his self fulfilling prophecy

I’m no medium, but I could have seen this one coming a mile away.  I think we all can predict a life of crime, imprisonment and possibly death for anyone, if they do the following:

1. Start a rap label and call it anything having to with drugs, crime, arrests, murder…you get the idea.  In this case let’s call it Take Down Records.
2. Make yourself CEO and give yourself an alias that carries the promise of organized crime. In this scenario let’s use the always popular surname Capone. Ace Capone.
3. Star in one of your own label’s music videos as…Ace Capone, the violent drug kingpin -  Be really convincing, because the video will be used as evidence against you in your own trial
4. When the cops raid your home, have on hand; over $500K in cash, 10 guns and 450 grams of cocaine.
5. Finally, do all of this in Philadelphia, the city with the ‘drug kingpin’ statute. 

Ace. Capone no more - Image:Philly.com

35 year old Alton Coles, aka Ace Capone, was sentenced to mandatory life plus 55 years on Thursday for, among other things drug trafficking, wire fraud, money laundering and weapons offenses.  Alton, the CEO of Take Down Records, father of five and owner of a local day care and ice water stand, cried while telling the judge that life in prison was too harsh a sentence for selling drugs. 

I’m not here to argue about whether the sentence was fair or not.  Or, whether Coles’ harsh childhood, including a crackhead father and absentee mother should have been taken into account during sentencing. That’s for another blog and another day.  What I am saying is this.  If, as a CEO, you choose, among all the words available to you in the English language, to name your company using a combination of words associated with crime, you choose to name yourself  after a notorious gangster  and you choose to write about, rap about and star in videos about selling drugs, then when you get busted,  that is what we call a self fulfilling prophesy.  Read more about the case against Coles here.