Boo Hoo in the Boardroom

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/boo-hoo-in-the-boardroom/

by jderick • 17 years ago

13 6 17 years ago

egan.blogs.nytimes.com

>“This is America. We don’t disparage wealth,” Obama said. What Americans won’t stand for, he said, are “executives being rewarded for failure,” especially when the taxpayers are doing the rewarding.

An unusually sensible thing for a president to say. Broadly appealing, yet so smart.

sgman• 17 years ago

>"An unusually sensible thing for a president to say."

It's sad that we are at a point that we consider it unusual when a president says something sensible.

donw• 17 years ago

You know, if they're having such a tough time staffing C-level positions at these companies for 500k/year, I'll just have to make a huge personal sacrifice and take that CEO job at General Motors.

earl• 17 years ago

I'll quit my startup and work as one of these execs too -- I have no experience at all running a large financial firm, which means that I have a chance of getting it right while every current financial executive has a strong track record of utter failure, incompetence, and outright fraud. So I'm clearly the better candidate -- there's at least a chance I won't screw this up!

wynand• 17 years ago

I have no idea how execs around the world always manage to create the illusion that there is a shortage of their skills.

It's easy, I suppose, when the economy is doing well, since executive failures can be covered up.

I can only hope that the rest of the world will use the current crises as proof that many of these people didn't know what they were doing and consequently that maybe their jobs are not as impossibly hard as they would to portray.

anamax• 17 years ago

> proof that many of these people didn't know what they were doing and consequently that maybe their jobs are not as impossibly hard as they would to portray.

The fact that a lot of people don't know how to do something does not imply that said something is easy to do.

If anything, the failures of such organizations is (weak) evidence that running such organizations is harder than we thought.

Boo Hoo in the Boardroom

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