Some people will do anything to bring you down but this guy knows how to fight his battles!

Find out how he fought an annoying new CIO at his office and retained his place at work.

Check out the details below.

Refuse to Provide Accurate Investment Percentages And Take Me Off Reporting Team? Enjoy being fired and losing equity in the business.

I work for a very large financial company.

Like the tech industry, occasionally we will want to pursue market opportunities in areas we are not necessarily experts in, and it is much easier and faster to buy (either whole or a controlling interest) in a specialized investment company or advisor in order to acquire their talent, resources and industry connections (commonly called an acqui-hire).

He explains how things have been for a while…

Several years ago, we acquired a controlling interest in one such company.

As an incentive to keep the talent on board and minimize disruptions to their business, instead of buying them outright, we bought about 2/3 of the interest and the management bought the remainder.

They then hung shares of that remainder over the heads of certain key managers as future bonuses to be triggered by performance and remaining with the company for specific amounts of time beyond the acquisition.

The CIO of the company was one such employee. We shall call him A CIO.

This is where it gets bad!

This guy was a piece of work. He prided himself in having attended some university (I forget which) and felt that anyone without a certain title or higher was beneath him.

He was used to being a big fish at his company, but didn’t quite get that guys like him in his new corporate parent were a dime a dozen.

I worked on the acquisition of his company and interacted with him fairly regularly, and while he was super nice with my boss, he never wasted an opportunity to be condescending to me (even though I was doing the bulk of the work).

He knew he had to do something about the new guy!

His favorite move was to refuse to answer my calls or emails and instead instruct his secretary to reply on his behalf after I had reached out to him multiple times about the same thing.

Luckily his secretary was awesome and IMHO, probably good enough to have done his job.

Anyhow, as a result of the acquisition, the company now had to report a host of different activities to the parent company on a fairly regular basis.

One of these things was the percentage ownership of certain investments in a wide range of funds, by a host of different entities.

Things got WORSE!

The thing to know is that as you invested in these funds, your entity acquired an equity stake that varied somewhat from reporting period to reporting period based on the performance of the fund and how much you were invested in it at the time.

Unless the size of your investment changed substantially, the percentage variation in the ownership stake varied very little from one period to another.

Still, those fluctuations had to be reported regardless of size.

I tracked these for a host of similar companies owned by the parent company and had developed a reporting system that all of them used, which ensured detailed and accurate reporting.

He got started on some intense work!

Everyone that is, except for this company, which at the express direction of their A CIO, refused.

Now I tried talking sense to the A CIO, his analysts and to his secretary, and in every case, he shut me down.

Instead of supplying the information in the manner requested, he sent me an automatic performance summary generated by different software and told me to figure out the numbers myself, because his staff didn’t have the time to change their methods and accommodate me.

Of course, I went to my bosses with this, and their advice that since this was a new company and we really wanted to build good relations with them while we were integrating them into our business, to just play along and try and play nice with this guy.

In other words, make the best of it.

This is where the fun part comes in!

Enter Malicious compliance.

I did exactly what they ordered me to do. Every single reporting period, for a year, I took their crappy report, fleshed out their numbers as best as possible, and reported them, fully knowing that they were inaccurate.

Every single time, I interacted with their staff, I made sure to tell them this and to ask them to please use the system every other investment subsidiary was using.

Every single time, they came back with orders from the A CIO to refuse.

Around that time, the Asshole CIO decided to grace us with his presence and flies in to do a meet and greet with our team.

He knew he had to take the chance here!

My boss and I even had a one on one meeting with him. A CIO comes into the room greets my boss and then proceeds to ignore that I’m standing in front of him with my hand out waiting to shake his (even looked me in the eye while proceeding to ignore me in front of my boss).

I waved off his behavior and time passed. About 6 months later the parent company decides to audit their business, and what do you think they find? yep, they find that all their equity and performance reports are off (sometimes way off).

Of course, the president of the sub gets a call from my boss’s boss, the Parent Company’s CIO and gets an earful.

They in turn pull in the A CIO and give him an earful about their reports. He immediately proceeds to throw me under the bus.

That’s INSANE!

The next day I get called in to my boss’s office for a conference call with the president of the subsidiary, the A CIO and the Corporate CIO. Right off the bat A CIO starts demeaning me and demanding to know how I could possibly have messed up their reporting.

The guy lays into me and demands that I be fired for the mess up. By now I’m tired of this guy’s game and I’m done playing nice with him, so I asked to be excused, get my laptop and return.

I then proceeded to forward and quote email after email evidencing my requests for compliance and his express refusal to do so… for a year and half. The Corporate CIO thanked me and asked me to step out of the meeting.

A couple of days later, my boss pulls me aside to tell me that going forward, the subsidiary will be reporting all figures as per my instructions, and the A CIO had gotten the neck chewing of a lifetime by his and my bosses.

There were certain conditions to this agreement.

However, while he agreed to comply going forward, he demanded that I no longer be part of the reporting process.

My boss told me not to worry about it, that it was one less thing for me to worry about and the A CIO was just being vindictive because I had embarrassed him in front of his bosses.

Fair enough, I passed the process on to someone else and enjoyed the reduced stress. I still had to interact with the company’s analysts on direct investments, but I no longer had to interact with the A CIO, which was fine by me.

Fast forward two months and I find out that A CIO has been fired, and that it was his handling of my report that caused the Corporate CIO to order a review of this guy’s investments and reporting at every level.

UH OH…

They found discrepancies everywhere (sometimes serious ones).

It seems he had been fudging numbers in order to report better performance than he was actually generating because he was not one of the initial equity holders but was one of those managers who had been offered equity stakes in the company based on performance and longevity.

His refusal to play ball with my little report ended up shinning a light on his activities, which ultimately cost him his job and a very lucrative equity stake in the business which was probably worth 7 figures.

YIKES! That sounds INSANE!

Why would someone bring this upon themselves?

Let’s find out what people on Reddit think about this one.

This user wishes they were smart enough to do these jobs.

This user wants to know why the CIO wasn’t fired earlier.

This user thinks the CIO could have been caught earlier!

This user suggests messing with the CIO on LinkedIn.

This user thinks this is a very professional story.

When will these bosses learn?

Seemingly never.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.