Mackey's the Real Wackoy

There's a terribly fascination for the business community when a CEO seems to melt before your very eyes. And Whole Foods John Mackey is doing just that. It turns out that for years he's been using a pseudonym to tout his own company and trash talk a competitor (that he now wants to acquire) on Yahoo Finance chat boards. Not only was he shooting from the hip, but he went after at least one journalist, Herb Greenberg.

Bloomberg has a good overview. By trying to take on the FTC and SEC while all this comes out, he's moved beyond putting feet into his mouth and is now filling it by the cubic yard. And not only is he doing things that the SEC might see as blatantly illegal, but he's trying to do them through chat rooms? Oh, puh-lease! As Greenberg aptly put it in another blog entry of his own:

To post on outside message boards, especially using an alias, not only shows poor judgment but strikes to the heart of a company's culture and makes you wonder what else might not be quite right.

How can you argue when said CEO is spending time writing such comments as "I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!" and "13 years from now Whole Foods will be a $800+ stock before splits."

My question is where is the board in all this? Are we to assume that none of the directors knew of his inclinations or of his posts? It would be altogether too easy to see Mackey as the sole problem and not look at the environment that permitted and even supported such actions.