Originally Posted by Dude
Originally Posted by Bostonian
Executives are paid to make informed decisions about what products to produce and sell, how to market them, where to open offices, whom to hire and how to set pay, how to fund operations, and countless other things. Successful executives tend to be smart because intelligence helps them make good decisions. Increasing profits is what they are paid by their shareholders (including many retirees, pension funds, and college endowments who need returns) to do. Bad management can be bad for workers as well. If executives make bad decisions about product lines, their companies are forced to shrink, and workers are laid off. Business is about serving people.

Why would management care about the company shrinking, or laying off employees? There are countless examples of CEOs getting big bonuses precisely BECAUSE they shrunk the company and laid off workers. Many other times, it happened due to bad decisions the previous CEO made, but the chickens came to roost only after his stock options had already matured. CEOs are making more money now than at any time in history, and the quality of their work is exhibited in the economic conditions of the last 6 years.

The open question is how much the deteriorating quality of the modern CEO is due to deteriorating mental ability, and how much to deteriorating moral values.

Their employers like what they've been doing. Seriously. It's just that the public doesn't figure into this anymore-- nor do employees. It's about the shareholders and the market now.

Analysts are not apparently very troubled by-- oh, how to put this--

reality as the rest of us know it. wink


Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.