I feel bad for Ralph Norris. I know there are those who want his head on a platter - and he's served that - but for some it will never be enough.
They'd like a public flogging, or for him to forgo all his money. I'm surprised there's not a petition yet from the most petty of us, to have his knighthood stripped off him. That's how we roll these days. Someone stumbles, let's cut their head off.
The upshot is, I believe Ralph Norris. I believe that he took the helm of Fletcher Building when it was already in trouble, that he tried to stem the flow of carnage to the best of his ability, that there were some things he just couldn't get an accurate read on, because it was either withheld or not passed on. I believe his version of it all because he has an exceptional corporate track record, and because he's done the noble thing. He's accepted he's at the top of the food chain and that therefore the buck stops with him. He's taken responsibility: he's quit.
But that's not enough for some people. People who hate success and wealth and anyone doing well, those people will want him to "pay" and to suffer. Those people have probably never run a board or a company in their lives. They're the same people who claim it's so easy to read the news you could get a monkey to do it. Put those people in a live studio reading an autocue in front of half a million people, or get them to front an annual shareholders meeting, and they'd probably stare blankly like a possum in the headlights, floundering to get a coherent word out of their mouths.
These are the same people who will argue that he should've personally been across every single thing, the contracts, the legals, the ins and outs of every single department and every document.
