The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Well Dalai Gee Did he get stock options?

1. Shake Shake Shake, Shake Shake Shake, Shake Your Buddha

The nuttiest thing happened this week: A company under the microscope at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab acknowledged that its behavior was indeed dumb.

This sort of admission doesn't happen too often. In fact, the last time we remember such a confession was 17 months ago, when CNBC decided that airing penis-enlargement product commercials wasn't a win-win proposition after all.

This time around, the apologetic company is salesforce.com, the customer relationship-management company run by Oracle (ORCL) veteran Marc Benioff. The company, which positions its products as an alternative to software installed on customers' computers, goes by the motto "Success. Not software."

Salesforce.com first got our attention two weeks ago when it sent us a poster of His Holiness the Dalai Lama -- the spiritual leader of the Government of Tibet in Exile.

The poster, which mentioned contributions to the Tibet Fund and the American Himalayan Foundation, invited recipients to a Sept. 5 appearance by the Dalai Lama. It also contained a nice little plug for salesforce.com: Above the picture of the meditatively posed Dalai Lama was the headline "There Is No Software on the Path to Enlightenment."

Wow, we thought. It's not often that you see a major worldwide religious leader endorsing CRM solutions. If Mother Teresa were alive, would she be shilling for Siebel Systems (SEBL)?

Yes, the idea of the Dalai Lama serving as a commercial pitchman struck us as a little distasteful. But who were we to feel holier-than-thou toward the Dalai Lama? He is, after all, His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Well, it turns out that the D.L. wasn't pitching salesforce.com after all. In a letter dated Aug. 27, Benioff said, "We are writing to apologize for having suggested in our invitation ... that either His Holiness the Dalai Lama or the American Himalayan Foundation endorse, or have ever authorized us to suggest that they endorse, our company or our business activities. Neither is true."