I don’t know what the future holds for outgoing Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli (you can see his farewell letter to Chrysler employees here), but maybe if we’re real lucky, he’ll go off somewhere and simply kick back and quietly count all the cash he’s earned from screwing up companies over the years.

For my money, Nardelli represents the worst in American management—a guy with a lot of great business skills but one major, game-breaking flaw—he was born without a humility gene. Nardelli is the arrogant, abrasive guy you hate to have as a boss, because he has never, ever been wrong, at least in his own mind.

Nardelli’s claim to fame goes back to when he was part of the great management playoff at General Electric in 2000, where he was one of three candidates vying to replace outgoing CEO Jack Welch. He didn’t get the job (that went to Jeff Immelt), so the consolation prize was that he was quickly snapped up to run The Home Depot.

Nardelli immediately took a hammer to Home Depot’s famous culture. He decided that the company was spending too much money on the orange-aproned experts you could always find roaming the aisles offering personal assistance.

In Nardelli’s mind, all those experts weren’t really needed, so he got rid of a lot of them, reduced the hours of others and hired more part-timers to cut costs. Seemingly overnight, Home Depot went from a place with great customer service to one where it became difficult to find anybody who could help you.

Later, Nardelli was in the news for presiding over one of the worst shareholder meetings of all time. Not a single Home Depot director was present, Nardelli gave no speech and he limited all questions from attendees to one minute. Nardelli refused to explain why the board wasn’t present, and in a nod to his arrogant nature, declined to explain anything to anyone at all.

The New York Times described his behavior at the shareholders meeting as “appalling,”  “disgraceful,”  “arrogant” and “contemptuous.” 

Although he doubled revenue during his tenure, he eventually was pushed out at Home Depot because the stock price lagged considerably compared to its chief competitor. He walked away in 2007 with a $210 million severance package, and that came on top of the nearly $360 million he had earned in salary and stock options.

Nardelli was replaced at Home Depot by Frank Blake, who immediately went to work trying to repair the company culture that his predecessor had done so much to destroy.  It’s an ongoing work in progress that was highlighted just this past week in a Barron’s story that noted Blake “is trying to refocus and energize store staffs whose morale sagged under Nardelli.”

Unfortunately, there is a crazy notion in this country that the ability to be a chief executive is some God-given skill that only a few special people are blessed with. That’s why guys like Nardelli keep resurfacing as CEO, as he did at Chrysler. I cringed when I heard that, knowing what he did at Home Depot, but I also knew that the damage might be limited given how screwed up Chrysler was when he came on board.

To be fair, Nardelli only took a $1-a-year salary at Chrysler (a magnanimous gesture that’s easy to make when you just walked away from Home Depot with a boatload of money). And, some accounts say that Nardelli worked on being less arrogant and abrasive while at Chrysler, although some of his old ways surfaced when he crammed a new vacation policy down workers’ throats.

Nardelli wasn’t able to perform any miracles at Chrysler—no surprise there—and as the Up to Speed blog in the Los Angeles Times noted, “Nardelli has run the smallest of the U.S. car companies since August 2007. Since then, Chrysler has seen its sales crash more deeply than any other major manufacturer, been forced to borrow $7.8 billion from the government to remain solvent and has had to submit to a shotgun marriage with Italian automaker Fiat to save the company.”

So, is it fair to rag on Bob Nardelli as he departs Chrysler? I think so, especially since he made so much money as a CEO for so little actual performance. He’s part of the reason executive compensation is out of control, and he’s a great object lesson for how someone who gets on the right CEO rocket can ride it to the stars no matter how badly they act or how poorly they perform.

I hope—no, I pray—that we have seen the last of Robert Nardelli as CEO. I wish he would just go somewhere and quietly count the hundreds of millions he’s made milking his arrogance and somehow getting smart people to pay him so much money for his dumb and willful behavior.

I only want to hear about him again as part of a case study for business students and would-be MBAs on how NOT to manage or act in a leadership role. That, and only that, is the way I can see Bob Nardelli ever adding any business value to anyone, anywhere, anymore.

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