Four signs of trouble at the top

If there's one thing that matters to a company, it's the quality of its management team. BP's shareholders are finding this out the hard way as they fail to deal with the Deepwater Horizon disaster. So how can you tell when a company's top team is becoming a hindrance rather than a help? Here, Tim Bennett outlines four things to watch out for.

The one thing we can say for sure about BP's Deepwater Horizon rig disaster is that BP's top executives have done almost everything they can to make a bad situation worse. From CEO Tony Hayward's recent high-profile yachting trip, to chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg's "We care about the small people" gaffe, it's been an object lesson for shareholders as to why the quality of a firm's management matters. But how can you tell when a company's top team is becoming a hindrance rather than a help? Here are four signs to watch out for.

1. The celebrity CEO

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.