Countrywide Financial - The New Excellence

Every now and then a great example of strong CEO leadership comes to us in the realm of performance review. Countrywide is just that entity for this example. The new excellence rating is based on how steep a company's stock price is charted over time. The steeper the downward (death spiraling) slope from left to right the greater the excellence rating for providing and strengthening of low expectations to the industry, the psychological state of the investing public, the weak confidence of the economy in the minds of households, and the subsequent actions taken in times of financial crisis to right or sink the ship.

As most know it is now Bank of America who must take the heat for the new excellence that Countrywide built. Bank of America has taken a very strong leadership of new excellence too by freezing withdrawals from home equity lines of credit. This excellent move ensures that an illusion of credit tightening has been implemented so that more households who handled their financial affairs much more soundly and responsibly, and who are actually held accountable, will now be unable to possibly manage through that small financial crisis. As the greatest CEO of all time I see the wisdom being implemented by these profound companies to attain the highest new excellence ratings. It almost makes me weepy to see our vast legacy of conglomerates strong arm their own customers to the brink of complete failure in their personal quests of achieving nothing. The only thing I wonder about is will a family choose to pay for food for their brood in lieu of their home equity line of credit or even their mortgage. Much food for thought. It does appear that Citigroup is taking similar new excellence approaches. Bravo!

CD