I’ve long held that you can learn a lot more from bad management practices than you can from good ones, and people like Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell and former Circuit City chairman Phillip Schoonover are living proof of that. They offer lessons on the dark side of workforce management and how NOT to get the most out of people, and in my experience, those kinds of horror stories speak louder and resonate longer than the good ones do.

And, that’s why even the long-anticipated firing of Oakland Raiders coach Lane Kiffin, who was given his walking papers this week, is a situation worth examining.

Here are the elements: A 79-year-old control-freak owner (Raiders managing general partner Al Davis) who has gone through eight head coaches in the past 14 years looking for a puppet who can read his mind and do his bidding without question, hires a 31-year-old college assistant coach with a reputation as being too cocky for his slim résumé, and, makes him the youngest head coach in the history of the National Football League. The cocky young coach isn’t a yes man or a puppet, however, and soon he is butting heads with the control-freak owner.

Guess where this one ends—with the nasty, public firing of the cocky young coach, of course, but only after many months of media speculation on when the control-freak owner would actually get around to it. And over the many months of media speculation, the cocky young coach turns into a mouthy young coach who seems to relish giving the media many of the details of his situation with the control-freak owner. That’s what makes the public firing all that much nastier.

“Al Davis did the worst thing possible,” wrote San Jose Mercury News columnist Ann Killion. “He dumped all the dirty, disgusting laundry out in front of the television cameras and microphones and notebooks. And the stench was awful. … Davis confirmed it all. Not only all the rumors and whispers that have been building for the past 20 months about his deteriorating relationship with Kiffin and all the little grudges held. But Davis also confirmed the Machiavellian, paranoid nature of his rule. He is an owner who sends his coach—a man who was in his office from dawn to dark every day—a Federal Expressed three-page letter of accusations to create a paper trail so as to have evidence in court. … Davis has hated Kiffin for a long time … yet he allowed the situation to fester and grow and distract his team while he was Fed Ex’ing letters and documenting ‘lies and propaganda.’ ”

Coaches get fired all the time, as do business executives and managers at organizations big and small. Sometimes those terminations are there for all to see, but usually the protocol is that these departures are about “leaving to pursue other interests.” That’s not how Al Davis does it. “It didn’t have anything to do with winning,” Davis said in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It had to with personality. It’s the first time I ever let anyone go based on what I call just being a flat-out liar.”

Is this how to fire a person? Of course not, but don’t think that this kind of over-the-top abusive behavior is confined to professional sports. I once worked for a guy who rivaled Al Davis as a control freak. He was an entrepreneur who also wanted yes men and puppets, and he hired and fired generations of managers who tried to exercise a little independent thinking. He wouldn’t stand for that, of course, and he seemed to revel in the power he had to fire people and make them feel powerless.

 There’s a special place in hell for people like that. It makes me wonder: Why would anyone want to publicly make it clear that he is a bully and control freak, more consumed with revenge and hurting someone than he is with building character and strength in his organization?

If anyone has a good answer to that question, I’d love to hear it.

Reputation is a funny thing.

Sometimes, you get adulations for a strong performance that you can’t seem to lose (think Jack Welch and what he did while CEO of General Electric, or someone like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines). Other times, you see people who work and toil and do great things (like former Delta CEO Gerald Grinstein ) but never really get the credit they deserve for their steady hand and solid style.

If you have been in the workplace for any time at all, you probably have seen another type as well: the person who continually gets over-the-top plaudits and kudos for no apparent reason. These people usually have giant egos, are generally about style over substance and seem to get the benefit of the doubt at every turn.

They also don’t get much critical scrutiny from anyone, and they leave everybody wondering: How do they manage to keep their job?

Can’t think of anyone like this? Well, here’s a good example that comes to my mind— Oakland Athletics vice president and general manager Billy Beane.

Even if you don’t follow Major League Baseball, Beane’s case is instructive for any manager or executive anywhere, because Beane is one of these guys who is lionized at every turn for his skills as an evaluator and manager of talent without much factual evidence to back that up. He was glorified as an out-of-the-box thinker and organizational strategist in the book Moneyball, but to me, the book simply overhyped an interesting management premise that, at least in Beane’s case, hasn’t made all that much of an impact.

For example:

• Beane’s Oakland teams have never reached the World Series, never won a league championship. They’ve won some division titles, yes, but have never had any great success.

• He’s dismissive of the other managers who work for him and seems to place little value on what they do. For example, he fired manager Ken Macha the year Macha took his team to the American League Championship Series (so much for appreciating good work), and as columnist Ray Ratto in the San Francisco Chronicle points out, “Beane’s well-known view of managers [is] that you can find them working Wal-Mart aisles. His is part of the new view of the manager’s place and value … that the [field] manager works for the general manager and cannot be allowed to be a competing center of power. Beane is wrong on this, of course, otherwise there would be no such thing as a Bobby Cox, or a Tony La Russa, or a Joe Torre.”

• He will follow his Moneyball approach over the cliff, even if it means sacrificing a season as a result. This year, Oakland was competitive (within three games of a playoff spot) in the American League West race until early July, when Beane started dumping the team’s most talented and marketable players under the misguided premise that he was rebuilding for next year.

You probably know managers and executives like Billy Beane, and it raises the question: What does a guy like this have to do to get fired? Can any business executive anywhere afford to write off an entire season? No, they generally can’t, because real managers can’t afford a rebuilding year.

As one San Francisco-area blog, beyondchron.org, put it, “Beane’s lack of a championship would have had him removed from more winning-oriented teams long ago. But the Bay Area sports fan often puts style over winning. … The progressive Bay Area does not want to cheer for Goliath; we like a David who uses smarts, rather than superior resources, to prevail. And Beane’s approach fits this perfectly, even though too many fans forget that David actually slew Goliath, while the [New York Yankees], and now the well-funded [Los Angeles] Angels, consistently beat the A’s.”

Reputations get made and reputations get shattered, but sometimes in business and in life, reputations get lifted up for no discernible reason. It drives me crazy, but were it not for the example set by the Billy Beanes of the world, I’d have a whole lot less to write about. 

What can you say about an organization that has nearly $100 million in annual revenue, $150 million in the bank and a huge national membership but seems to be in no big hurry to name a new leader after the old one retires?

If this were a publicly traded company, stockholders and Wall Street would be getting pretty antsy and asking a lot of pointed questions. But this is a not-for-profit organization that isn’t bound by those silly business rules. Yes, I’m taking about SHRM—the Society for Human Resource Management.

I’m often critical of SHRM (as others are critical of me for being so critical), and it is largely because of things like this. To wit: letting the organization drift for six months after the old CEO announces her retirement. In other words, why hasn’t the SHRM board gotten its act together and hired someone already?

Sue Meisinger announced her retirement as the organization’s CEO on January 8  and said at the time that she would “remain at SHRM until a new CEO is selected to ensure a smooth transition.” I believe she was being honest when she said that because she thought the SHRM board of directors would move fairly quickly to find and name a successor.

In fact, I thought that it would happen at the annual conference in Chicago last month, because it offered the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to Meisinger, welcome the new leader and have a very visible passing of the baton from the old to the new. But clearly even Meisinger, the ultimate SHRM trouper, got tired of waiting for the board to act and her successor to be named. She left June 30, with SHRM saying at that time that they would have a new leader named by August 1. China Miner Gorman, SHRM’s chief operating officer, is the acting CEO.

I hope the SHRM board of directors follows through and names a new CEO this week, as they’ve indicated, but I’m not holding my breath. As I wrote from the SHRM conference last month, I think the board missed a marvelous opportunity to help the organization make a smooth transition to the future, but it would be well worth the wait if it was because the board was nailing down the perfect candidate to lead SHRM into the future.

And who would that person be?

That’s easy to answer: It should be someone like former SHRM chief executive Mike Losey, a strong businessperson with top leadership experience who knows how to drive an organization ahead. Or it could be a creative, experienced, strategic HR professional—someone like former Home Depot HR chief Dennis Donovan. (Donovan, it should be noted, already has a pretty interesting job—running HR for Cerberus Capital Management.) In any event, SHRM needs someone strongly grounded in business and managing people, and not a bureaucrat or organization professional.

How hard is this executive search, anyway? Do you have any ideas on whom SHRM should name CEO? Have you heard any chat on the grapevine about candidates? Feel free to send any thoughts to me at jhollon@workforce.com or add them to the bottom of this post. If the SHRM board fails to deliver a candidate by August 1, they may need some help from all of us getting this CEO thing figured out.

Some lessons bear repeating —and relearning— over and over again. Here’s a good example: Companies that treat their own employees well have better reputations with the public at large.

Advertising Age (a sister publication of Workforce Management) today had results of the 2007 Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient study that lists the U.S. companies with the best (and worst) reputations. Here are the top five companies, ranked by the percentage of people who believe that the company comes across as genuine and authentic in its actions:

1. Johnson & Johnson
2. United Parcel Service
3. Google
4. Kraft Foods
5. Walt Disney Co.

The surprising finding here was how well Google placed despite spending very little on advertising or marketing.

“Google is the perfect example showing reputation does not correlate with ad spending,” Robert Fronk, senior VP-senior consultant, reputation strategy, at Harris Interactive, told Ad Age. “The positive perception of how you treat your employees, your corporate social responsibility efforts, and your products and services and the amount of media that can generate probably trumps any ad spend they would ever want to make.”

Treating workers well would seem to be a no-brainer, an easy thing to do. Yet surprisingly, a lot of organizations just don’t get it or do it. That’s why strong and caring leaders like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines are so rare and hard to find. But as the Google ranking in the Harris poll shows, treating workers well has a bottom-line impact, yet doesn’t take a lot of marketing or advertising to make happen.

The survey also points out this sobering note: that big business, in general, did not fare well in the study. Some 71 percent of consumers said the reputation of corporate America is either “not good” or “terrible.”

Google, and all the other companies that fared well in the Harris study, show that there is another way. Treating people well, whether it be customers or employees, is a best practice that can dramatically affect the bottom line. But it makes me wonder: If it clearly makes so much business sense, why do so many companies fail to do it?