The weak non-apology aside, I can guarantee that this person does not feel a shred of sorrow. This is how the vast majority of CEOs think. You can see her sheer frustration at 0:55 in the video, she's so genuinely affronted that her employees would dare to ask about bonuses that her speech speeds up considerably.
This is to be expected. Typical power structures, especially those in corporate America favor the promotion of liars, backstabbers, cheats, and controlling people to leadership positions at a far higher rate than calm, friendly, nice ones.
This goes doubly so now that workers have a bit more power -- remember that outside tech, the job market is still pretty tight for employers, similar to 2021. Honestly, following Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, anyone who is capable of getting themselves into a leadership position should on no account be allowed to do the job.
If you want to change this, there are few options -- but a good one is to stop rewarding these assholes with your money. I am going to avoid Herman Miller as much as I can in the future for personal or professional furniture.
I think something people in this community should consider is incorporating their ventures in more equitable and democratic ways (as B corps, as worker's cooperatives, etc). It won't be possible for everyone (particularly people relying on angel funding, who will presumably be met with great skepticism) but I think it may be possible to create some new expectations about how a company runs, and that small worker's coops may have an advantage in tech. Tech requires lots of cross-disciplinary cooperation, so I think small, flat co-ops may come to better decisions faster and have an advantage over other firms.
Her speech didn’t bother me at all. Company needs to make money and apparently it isn’t, yet people still want bonuses. Pay them and hurt the company, or don’t pay but maybe lose your best employees.
This is why only a few people are capable of running companies. The reality of profit and loss - aka “math” - is too much for most people.
> The reality of profit and loss - aka “math” - is too much for most people.
If it was just math, a lot more people would be better at it. But your own statement shows how there’s much more to it than math: “Pay them and hurt the company, or don’t pay but maybe lose your best employees.”
No math is going to tell you how to decide that situation. And business is full of such decisions, which collectively can make or break a company.
The commentary around this frames the situation that cold hearted capitalists don’t understand the feelings of employees. Or some sort of emotional issue. The reality is the company is failing, can’t pay people what you don’t have.
Telling people they're in "pity city" doesn't pay the bills either. It's obviously made things worse. Patronizing your employees is needless and poor leadership.
That said, it's far from the most egregious thing I've heard, I'm not going to spend many cycles thinking about it. But I can understand why the employees would be upset by it.
The company isn't even failing. Yes, growth is way way down but revenue and net income are still fine.
People setting up home offices has been a hugely growing market that apparently has gone uncaptured by MillerKnoll. I wonder who sets the strategy for a company that we could blame for this failing? Whomever they are, they probably shouldn't get a bonus as that would be rewarding failure.
> The reality is the company is failing, can’t pay people what you don’t have.
If the company is failing, then leadership should be cutting their losses and engaging in deep layoffs. Downsize production to adjust for lower demand, preserve working capital, focus on efficiency. Upsetting your employees is the worst of both worlds: your employees perform worse, and you don't save any money on compensation while that happens. So you make a deep cut, take the emotional hit, make it clear that it's the only cut you're going to make, and then ramp the company back up.
> The commentary around this frames the situation that cold hearted capitalists don’t understand the feelings of employees. Or some sort of emotional issue.
Uh, not really. The only one emotions we are talking about here are the CEO's, and how they are impacting communication with employees.
> The reality is the company is failing, can’t pay people what you don’t have.
There are good ways to communicate this reality to your employees. If you think what the CEO did is a good way, then I wish you good luck.
Owen made $3.9 million in bonuses on top of her fixed salary of $1.1 million in 2022 and yet you're complaining about the people actually doing the work getting bonuses?
The board can fire the CEO and the CEO can fire anyone. By all means start your own company that operates differently. It isn’t surprising to me that the most effective companies are all setup essentially the same however.
The least effective companies are all setup the same way too.
CEO's get paid when the companies do well and they get paid when they do poorly. They get paid if it completely falls apart. How does that help companies perform better? How does that profit and loss math work here?
They get paid when they’re fired. They get paid when they’re accused (credibly even) of sexual harassment and misconduct. For all this talk of “math”, this particular math is just beyond my ability to grasp.
> Pay them and hurt the company, or don’t pay but maybe lose your best employees.
There's always another option: restructuring (the organization, compensation structures, product portfolios and market positioning...), getting in the trenches (understanding that performance fundamentally depends on emotional state)... The "math" tells you where you are, and it can illustrate that you sometimes work within real limitations, but it doesn't define how you should react.
> This is why only a few people are capable of running companies. The reality of profit and loss - aka “math” - is too much for most people.
Who are you claiming here is capable of running a company because the reality of profit and loss isn't too much? The person receiving over $3m in bonuses despite the her company "needs to make money and apparently isn't"? It sure seems to me like she's one of those people who "still want bonuses".
Do you have any sort of sources to back those claims up? I’m not American, and I can only speak from anecdotal experience from the Danish digitalisation sector, both public and private, but I’ve never met a CEO or any sort of manager they match your description. A few were assholes, more (managers) were incompetent but none of them were backstabbers, liars or cheats, because you genuinely can’t lead people if you are. This of course doesn’t apply to a lot of other lines of work, we recently had a grocery delivery where the drivers phone had malfunctioned, so I lend him mine to call his company while I tried to tech-support his. Long story short, I overheard some of the stuff he was told by his company and it was literal basic stuff like “remember to be really nice and say thank you” in a much more demeaning manner. The driver had already been way nicer than what they told them to be, but he kept the phone call open while I was thanked again… So there are certainly businesses where the company policy is to treat employees like shit. But I haven’t met those managers, so I can speak for them, and the ones I have met got there for various reasons where the worst was that they were the only ones they wanted the position. The CEOs I’ve met either came from money or made money from starting another company, then using that money to build a new one. Or they were hired through a tough process with a lot of competition. Only one was an asshole, and he still wouldn’t lie, cheat or backstab, but he would behave like an asshole, and mostly get away with it. It was while I worked in the public sector where we had municipality owned cars with designated parking spots, and he would park in one and refuse to leave. He’d also walk over people in meetings, if they let him, but that situation should frankly never arise.
What I have encountered, and this is partly because I did a stint in management (and the necessary education that you’ll typically be required to get in Denmark if you’re promoted into management) before I went back to being a programmer as I hated managing people, was that management lives in a different world than employees as well as being an employee themselves. I think this is a video of someone who forgot that there are two worlds, and also someone who maybe forgot (or never learned) about motivational theory, and well, how to communicate with dignity and respect, but at the end of the day, an organisation has goals and CEOs and managers are responsible for reaching those goals with the resources they are given. One or the first things you’ll learn in MBA type studies is that everyone is expendable, it’s only a question of how much it’ll cost to lose them. You can see this as a negative thing, but it can mean a lot of things. In programming it tells a manager to encourage their employees to build code in a manner that’s not too dependent on its authors. We do this by employing various principles for coding standard and documentation because if we don’t, it gets really expensive when someone quits. I personally think it’s a good thing to learn as an employee as well, because it’s healthy to keep a distance from your job and your personality, so that you can better be an employee and also a person and not have that melt too much together so that it gets soul crushing for you when you get fired. Which you probably will, and often not for any reasons you could help.
That being said. I get that this “pity city” was an eureka moment for her, but how hilarious is it that she didn’t consider how it sounded to non managers?
Well as someone who has had corporate jobs for 20+ years you need to read a little between the lines. She was goaded into the response, you hear it from the question already it is from someone who is fed-up! Because the little bit of information going around is that she received her bonus and then there sits in a call claiming that they aren't meeting targets, if the company is failing to meet targets there is no bonuses even if you are the CEO. It is why she receives the pointed question of "how are we supposed to be motivated if we don't get a bonus?" no one professional asks it like that unless they are after a response. Oh boy did they get a clip.... I'm guessing that she has rationalized her own bonus in the past by saying that she needs it to be motivated.
I’ve never met a CEO or any sort of manager they match your description.
A few were assholes, more (managers) were incompetent but none of them were
backstabbers, liars or cheats, because you genuinely can’t lead people if you
are.
Sure. I worked for a company where the money ran out. Turns out the CEO was embezzling the money and eventually went to jail for fraud related stuff. Or look at Theranos. Nikola? Here's another ten.
Every **ing CEO is like that, dude. Just look at all the massively profitable companies laying people off by the thousand so they can cow whoever's left into working harder for less in the way of bonuses/promotions.
CEOs are also extremely charismatic. When a random doofus nerd runs across one in person, they charm the hell out of the nerd and seem like the coolest, nicest person said nerd has ever met. Same goes for politicians. The fact that you're friends with a couple of CEOs basically means nothing at all.
Quite a lot of assumptions you make on my behalf. It would be nice if you could refrained from doing that in the future.
What are you even hoping to achieve with that post? Your experiences may be very different from mine, and that is just fine, but there is no reason to be rude about it.
ah, sorry man, I wasn't trying to insult you directly
Your post is basically saying "Hey, all those times in your life that a company screwed you over were actually good, and you were wrong to be unhappy about it", and I wanted to debunk that for you and anyone else who reads what you posted
> I’m not American, and I can only speak from anecdotal experience from the Danish digitalisation sector, both public and private
This is specifically why I mentioned the American corporate system. The cultures are very different. For an example that you might specifically identify, most American corporate managers would consider anything approaching Janteloven extremely woke and socialist.
This is to be expected. Typical power structures, especially those in corporate America favor the promotion of liars, backstabbers, cheats, and controlling people to leadership positions at a far higher rate than calm, friendly, nice ones.
This goes doubly so now that workers have a bit more power -- remember that outside tech, the job market is still pretty tight for employers, similar to 2021. Honestly, following Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, anyone who is capable of getting themselves into a leadership position should on no account be allowed to do the job.
If you want to change this, there are few options -- but a good one is to stop rewarding these assholes with your money. I am going to avoid Herman Miller as much as I can in the future for personal or professional furniture.