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FEBRUARY 9, 2011

JOHN J. GABARRO
COLLEEN KAFTAN

Jamie Turner at MLI, Inc.
“Had I known how hard this job would be, I might have thought twice about leaving the one at
Wolf River,” Jamie Turner reflected as he waited for his boss, Pat Cardullo, to arrive at the office on a blustery September morning. At 32, Turner was struggling in his third marketing management position since completing his MBA six years earlier. Only six months into his current assignment at
Modern Lighting Industries, Inc. (MLI), he was starting to worry that his string of previous successes had hit a serious snag. Working for Cardullo had become as confusing, unpredictable, and frustrating as anything he’d ever experienced.
When Cardullo, president of MLI, had interviewed Turner and invited him to join the company as vice president for marketing and sales, Turner had found the older man smart, friendly, even charismatic. Cardullo had offered him a free hand in reorganizing the marketing area, and had all but guaranteed that Turner would take over as president within two years. Before long, however, things began to go wrong: Cardullo started to seem distant and critical, and he intervened frequently in marketing decisions, sometimes undermining or even reversing Turner’s decisions. The turnaround
Cardullo was attempting to engineer at MLI had stalled, sales were again declining, and things in general were rapidly deteriorating. Turner didn’t know whether to be happy or anxious—or both— when Alan Oliver, the CEO of MLI’s parent company, announced that he would fly in the following week to review the situation.
Turner thought it was critical to resolve his differences with Cardullo before Oliver arrived.
Hoping to talk things out, he had asked Cardullo to join him for drinks after work, and then for lunch each of the next two days—but Cardullo declined all three