SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Unity (NYSE: U) (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. James M. Whitehurst has been appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the Board. Roelof Botha, Lead Independent Director of the Unity Board, has been appointed Chairman. Mr. Riccitiello will continue to advise Unity to ensure a smooth transition.
He can’t be a “scapegoat” if he is the CEO. The buck stops with him, there is literally no one else left up the chain who can be responsible. It’s his job.
Except for the board of directors that actually steers the company.
OK, how about the shareholders that elect the Board of Directors? Should they be “removed” as well?
My point is the function of the Chief Executive Officer is specifically to be accountable and responsible for the business functions of the company. Yes, BOD has made a bad call selecting him as a CEO and the shareholders will have an opportunity to re-elect the BOD, but how the business is run (the “Chief Executive” part) is owned by the CEO. And in this case he fucked up especially if he championed this pricing structure.
The Board chose him, an EA guy with his track record of screw-the-customer decisions, to head a B2B company where customer relationships are totally different from B2C, and customers aren’t mainly naive fad-following kids that will keep pre-ordering games from companies that screw them in the past.
They’re dealing with adults with businesses as customers, not thrill-seeking teens who will forget any and all shit done to them in the past just to keep on playing the same games as their friends.
At the very least the members of the Board are spectacularly incompetent and should be removed so that the company has a chance of not collapsing withing the next 2 or 3 years (as projects that can’t be moved out of Unity wrap up and customers chose different frameworks for new projects).
The shareholders elect the BOD and they can remove them if they like. So in theory if you want to burn the house down then go after the shareholders too and the capitalistic society, but in my opinion that’s another battle for another time.
In practice this is the reason why companies have CEOs. They are practically accountable for exactly the stuff like this, it’s a well known part of their job description. That’s the reason why I don’t really consider him a scapegoat because, well, it’s literally his job.
The scapegoat part is that the company won’t change at all.