

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

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helveticaman
>“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
>"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.

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donw
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.

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wynand
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
> 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.

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earl
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!

