When Elliot Spitzer put his sites on AIG’s Hank Greenberg a few years ago, he was trying to punish the company for working within the industry to get bankrupt insurance companies to specialize in the regions they knew and understood best. The former attorney general and eventually governor called for antitrust violations and forced Hank Greenberg to leave the company.

AIG then hired a new team, that team made very bad decisions and secured deals for investment banks and became a facilitator for much of the manipulation. One HR consultant said it best when he wrote an article for Human Resource Executive Online asking if there are “HR lessons from investment banking.” Keep saying:

Remarkably insensitive and inept management, combined with huge rewards for success and incentives to hide failure, are some of the typical attitudes exhibited by financial institutions, many of which have been failing. HR leaders must understand the dynamics of such crises to avoid that fate in their own organizations. ”

One can only wonder that if hiring managers do their best and are not overwhelmed by executives who hire their friends, if in the future those who lack integrity will never be hired in the first place. In fact, I guarantee that Hank Greenberg, who made AIG the giant it is today, would never have allowed the company to endorse such weak deals. But with the departure of Hank Greenberg and the entry of new executives, no one should be surprised by the end result.