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Dumb things CEOs say out loud

Chip Wilson says Vancouver-based company is now 'back on track.' Entrepreneur wants to spend time on a new apparel venture

Chip Wilson, the Lululemon founder who has a chronic case of foot-in-mouth disease, had another flare up this week.

In an interview with a New York Times reporter, the 60-year old Vancouver-based billionaire shamed her in front of his staff for being 15 minutes late to a breakfast meeting, inferring that it was an example of “Jewish Standard Time.” He would go on to remark about the company around the table - all young women, most of them employees - highlighting “the beautiful girl I get to sit beside.”

Sigh. Okay, Chip.

This isn’t the first time he’s said something inappropriate. He resigned from his own company in 2013 after stock prices tanked when he suggested that Lululemon’s yoga pants “don’t work for some women’s bodies.” The company later recalled about 17 per cent of its pants because they were too transparent.

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Wilson’s misadventures had us looking back at other blunders CEOs have made in public.

Dov Charney is the Montreal-born founder and former CEO of clothing chain American Apparel, notable for making its clothing in the U.S., offering fair wages healthcare to workers and and avoided outsourcing production to sweatshops.

Laudable achievements, but Charney is also famous for a series of sexual harassment lawsuits that eventually let to him leaving the company in 2014.

He is known for walking around only in skimpy underwear in front of employees and even masturbating as many as eight times in front of a Jane reporter interviewing him in 2004, and there are claims he referred to women as “whores” and “sluts.”

I frequently drop my pants to show people my new product,” said Charney.

There are almost endless accounts of his bad behaviour. Here are nine examples in GQ magazine of things he has allegedly said to employees that we’d prefer not to repeat.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, came under fire in 2014 for suggesting — at an event for women in computing — that for women, not asking for a raise was “good karma.”

“It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” he said.

He later wrote a message to Microsoft staff saying that he was wrong, and that “If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”

Peter Nygard, the Finnish-Canadian founder of Canadian women’s clothing manufacturer Nygård International, has been a controversial figure for many years.

In the late 1990s he paid to settle three sexual harassment complaints filed by former employees with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, and he has faced a decades-long trail of legal controversies. He has sued people who have accused him of abusive labor practices, tax evasion, sexual harassment and rape, as explained by Forbes.

The magazine reports that a former business partner claims he said “No one has ever disobeyed my orders and gotten away with it!”

Tony Hayward was replaced in 2010 as CEO of BP, the oil company responsible for discharging the equivalence of 4.9 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, a spill which continued for 87 days.

“"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume,“ Hayward said, attempting to explain the significance of the spill. He would go on to acknowledge that "we made a few little mistakes early on” and that “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do, I’d like my life back.”

For Hayward, having his life back meant racing on his yacht, pictured above, while he proceeded to do anyway… while workers were still scrambling to curtail the the spill.

Gay rights groups were outraged by the anti-gay statements of Guido Barilla, CEO of his eponymously named pasta company Barilla. Grocery shoppers were encouraged to boycott the products after he told an Italian radio station that he would never use a gay family in his company’s advertising campaigns.

“I would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect but because we don’t agree with them. Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role,” Barilla said.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Volkswagen AG CEO Matthias Müller said “It was an ethical problem? I cannot understand why you say that.”

Turns out it was an ethical problem, the company was found to have cheated on emissions tests to make the cars appear more environmentally friendly than they are.

Evan Spiegel, Snapchat co-founder and CEO, likely regrets some emails he sent as a frat brother at Stanford. The emails, talking about getting girls drunk to have sex, were outed by a Gawker blog.

However gay rights group protested loudly, and Lisa Henson, CEO of the the Jim Henson Company, said that her company would no longer partner with the company on licensing deals for kids’ meal toys.

Chairman Ed Burkhardt, Chairman of Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, said “when you’re exhausted you’ll always sleep,” when asked “how do you sleep at night?” by a reporter.

His company was the focus of intense scrutiny in the face of the 2013 Lac-Mégantic tragedy, in which 47 people were killed when one of the company’s trains plowed into the centre of the Quebec town.

Burkhardt says the comments were taken out of context.