Sweet revenge

By Jena McGregor, Steve Hamm and David Kiley

updated 2:13 p.m. ET Jan. 16, 2007

When it comes to Larry Ellison, Terry Garnett does not mince words. "I do hold grudges," Garnett says. "Am I motivated by that? Absolutely." A former Oracle Corp. senior vice-president, Garnett spent the early 1990s traveling around the world with Ellison, Oracle's CEO. They hobnobbed with the likes of media moguls David Geffen and Barry Diller as the company tried to become a player in the interactive-TV business. Garnett and the software billionaire were so tight that Ellison even invited him and his wife to go along on a vacation to Kyoto in 1994. That year marked the 1,200th anniversary of the founding of Japan's former imperial capital, a meaningful occasion for Ellison, a passionate Japanophile. Together, he, Garnett, and four others made the pilgrimage along the cherry-blossom-lined Philosopher's Walk to the famed Ginkakuji Temple.

But what came next led to the bad blood that Garnett still tastes more than 12 years later. Within weeks of their return from Japan, Ellison summoned Garnett to his office. He scrapped the interactive-TV startup the two were planning and, Garnett claims, fired him without giving a clear reason. "It was pretty clinical," he recalls. "I tried to keep composed."

Feeling numb, Garnett returned to his office, not more than 30 feet away, and packed up. Afterward, he spent weeks trying to understand why he had been fired. Garnett later sued Ellison, accusing him of unfairly firing him, but then he dropped the claims. (Oracle officials declined to comment, but their reply to Garnett's suit cites his "declining productivity.") Brimming with anger, Garnett made a vow to himself: "There will be a day of reckoning." Today he is acting CEO of Ingres Corp., a software upstart that's gunning to grab market share from Oracle.

Ask CEOs what drives them, and they'll talk about success, personal fulfillment—a few will even admit to be driven by the desire for money and power. But Garnett's professed appetite for payback is a motivation rarely leaked from executives' on-message lips. "It's one of the great undiscussables," says Kenneth N. Siegel, a Los Angeles psychologist and coach to senior executives. "Just as you don't talk about lust in the executive suite, you don't talk about revenge as a significant motivator for success. But it clearly is."

In our euphemism-laden, numbers-driven, "it's just business" corporate environment, it's easy to forget that the desire to get even is one of those primal human impulses that lurks behind executive behavior. Revenge is at least as old as the Bible ("Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord) and provided a plot line for many a Shakespearean tragedy, but it's also written into the script of many of the most memorable corporate dramas. And in today's hypercompetitive business world, as the spiraling rate of executive turnover leaves behind a trail of ousted managers and as leaders marred by recent corporate scandals try to restore their reputations, it's a subtext of many of the most dramatic recent business stories, too.

Exhibit A: The Hewlett-Packard Co. leak investigation. Yes, maverick board member and wealthy venture capitalist Tom Perkins did the world a service in alerting government officials to the unsavory tactics being used by investigators hired by HP. But there's another way to look at this whole sordid saga.

MORE FROM BUSINESSWEEK Video: Q&A with Psychoanalyst Kerry Sulkowicz Podcast: Sweet Revenge Grudges in the Cubicle The Best Way to Bounce Back Don't Get Mad. Get Even

Perkins, who would resign from the board, and Patricia C. Dunn, then its chairman, were embroiled in a bitter feud over board procedures. After the results of the leak probe, which fingered Perkins' good friend, George A. "Jay" Keyworth II, were presented at a board meeting in May, Perkins accused Dunn of betraying him, violating an agreement they'd made to handle the leaker's identity "offline." (According to Dunn, there was no such arrangement.) He claimed that the reputation of "a good man" — his buddy Keyworth — was being "ruined," Dunn has said. After she stepped down as chairman in September, Perkins seemed to relish the moment. "My No. 1 thing was to get Pattie [Dunn] out as chairman, and I got that," he told Newsweek. "So I'm happy." Perkins, one might say, had gotten his revenge. (A rep for Perkins says he "acted solely in the best interests of HP, its shareholders and employees.")

"Poetic justice"
The HP tale isn't last year's only payback-tinged business drama. Kenneth G. Langone, the fiery billionaire co-founder of Home Depot Inc. and onetime head of the compensation committee of the New York Stock Exchange's board, was named in a lawsuit by former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer over his role in ex-Big Board Chairman Richard Grasso's giant $187.5 million pay package. In early 2006, during Spitzer's campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, Langone and members of his family gave $64,000 to Spitzer's long-odds opponent, Tom Suozzi. He also urged friends and associates to donate money. (In an e-mail, Langone said: "I thought it was time to stand up to [Spitzer] and demand accountability. It wasn't revenge, it was principle." His spokesperson says the funding was based "on the merits" of Suozzi's candidacy.)

And following the government's indictments in May of class action law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman for alleged illegal kickbacks to plaintiffs, some in Silicon Valley are savoring the twist of fate. While William Lerach, who aggressively sued technology companies in the 1990s and left the firm in 2004, has not been named in the indictment, some executives still relish his former firm's misfortune. "We're all enjoying it because he's a parasite," says T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. in San Jose. "It's just poetic justice."

Rodgers' glee has a name, of course: schadenfreude, or joy at others' woes. It's a close cousin to the desire for revenge. The satisfaction we receive from the punishment of others is not only something we can all identify with, but something to which we're all neurologically inclined.

Ernst Fehr, a behavioral economist at the University of Zurich, studies how our brains react when "social norms" are violated. In Fehr's research, two players are asked to exchange money according to various scenarios. When one player hoards the cash for himself, the other has an opportunity to punish him financially. The player who got burned is hooked up to a brain scan while he's considering whether to retaliate. Fehr found that the part of our brains associated with feeling satisfaction was more strongly activated while players contemplated getting even. "There is a hedonic force behind the punishment," says Fehr. Put simply: Revenge is biologically, scientifically sweet.

There's something delicious about getting back at someone who has hurt us. Or doing well as that person looks on. Savoring the balm of revenge does not require active stabs at retribution; it can also be a byproduct of success. "We hold the illusion that if the other person is as venomous as we think, [even] their knowledge of our success is psychologically damaging to them," says Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management.

Spurned CEOs can experience this form of pleasure by turning around a struggling competitor. Consider Millard "Mickey" Drexler, the "merchant prince," as he has been called for his pitch-perfect retailing skills, who was pushed out of Gap Inc. in 2002 after 19 years at the helm. Unlike most other CEOs, who walk out the door with millions in severance, Drexler left behind a hefty package and its noncompete restrictions.

That decision allowed him to bag a job leading preppy retailer J. Crew Inc., which he helped private equity firm Texas Pacific Group take public in June. Since joining J. Crew, Drexler, 62, has hired at least two dozen executives away from his former employer. He has also launched a new brand called Madewell that, with prices below J. Crew's, could compete with Gap. Madewell's two stores, which opened in August, carry hip, high-quality jeans, sweaters, and accessories. Sound familiar? (One J. Crew representative says Madewell is not intended as a Gap competitor.)

Drexler has insisted he is not motivated by revenge, but he has also said that anger over his departure "helps fuel my accomplishment now." Even if payback isn't an active pursuit, he's probably savoring the redemption. J. Crew's initial public offering was one of the most successful in 2006. In its most recent quarter, operating income increased 51% from the year before. Meanwhile, his successor at Gap, Paul Pressler, is experiencing steady drops in sales and may be exploring a sale of the company. "[Drexler's] parting at Gap now in retrospect is probably deeply regretted," Evan S. Dobelle, a former Gap board member and now president of the New England Board of Higher Education, said in an e-mail. Drexler declined to comment to BusinessWeek.

MORE FROM BUSINESSWEEK

BusinessWeek Section Front

Why Google Is Buying AdMob The Global Innovation Migration Dow Hits 2009 Closing High Stock Market Shrugs Off Jobs Report Oracle's Sun Deal: Oracle May Need to Loosen Its Grip Stocks: Five Market Mistakes to Avoid Referendums 2009: Gains for Government Spending, Gambling Banks' H1N1 Flu Vaccines Stir Outrage Intel-Dell Dealings Under Fire A Bold Plan for Chrysler BusinessWeek Section Front