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You really don't understand CEO hiring procedures at all, do you?



You really don't understand CEO hiring procedures or compensation structuring at all, do you?



While I don't agree with smash on the 'swap ceos with a RNG' theory, quite a lot of the decision making is either made easy by in-house analysis, and choosing the 'correct' answer to a tough decision doesn't have a strong, or even weak, correlation with compensation. The CEO's most important job is actually being a figurehead.

The CEO's most important job is actually being a figurehead.

Barely even this. The most important job is the anthropomorphizing of a balance sheet. There's no requirement to have social skills. Many "successful" CEOs have been and are known ******** who don't present their companies very effectively. Reed Hastings comes to mind. Eisner when he was at Disney. Jamie Dimon. Steve Ballmer. etc.

I think your wife is a smart lady. Maybe she'll agree if she is the charity you're giving it to

I didn't miss anything. There's nothing there. Let's remember that we were talking about a CEO who is already a voting member of the board for the company. So he's in a group of a dozen or so people who make up a controlling interest in the ownership of the company. Let's imagine for a moment that he and each of the other 11 board members personally hold 5% of a company with stock valuation at say $100B, collectively holding 60% and a controlling stake in the company (yes, I'm oversimplifying this, but this example is good enough). Let's say they want one of them to be CEO, so they pick the least capable of the bunch and give him a $10M/year salary.

Um... The guy holds $5B in stock. A random week on the market will cost or gain him more than that yearly salary. It's nothing. It's certainly not something he'd take if he thought "I really suck at this job" because he and the other 11 guys will lose more money if he shows up on TV with his tie crooked than they'll lose each year from paying his salary. There is no financial reason to put a buddy in that position. Ego reasons? Sure. But companies that do that often suffer for it.



Key phrase being "can be a competent one". I've met a lot of people with MBAs whom I wouldn't trust to operate a lemonade stand Smash. They hand those degrees out like candy. Executives who can consistently make good choices that benefit their companies are actually quite rare. And CEOs who start their own company absolutely have a huge impact on the success of said company.



Yes. Among other decisions.



No. Someone at the VP level came to Jack Welch with 12 different executive summaries with recommendations about different R&D projects, and he made the final decision regarding funding and priority for them. And if he didn't do so directly he chose the guy who did. Then years later, if they spent their R&D budget correctly, they were poised to make money in an emerging market. If they chose poorly, they lose money. CEOs make decisions about whether and where and how to expand the business. They make decisions about acquisitions. They make decisions about resource division across the company. Obviously, they have folks under them (usually several layers of folks) who deal with the details, but the big broad decisions will be made by the CEO.



No. He made the decision to get into the car business when he did and to operate his company the way he did. That's why a century later, there are cars with his name on them.



Yup. Which means they failed, while those who realized the right time for the right product succeeded. By your logic, no decisions anyone makes matters at all because it's just random as to whether they just happened to be the right ones. That's insane.




So what? It wasn't random chance that one succeeds and the other does not.



Yeah. It kinda is. You've been spouting this narrative for as long as you've been posting here. White people were just lucky to pop out of the right ******, successful people were just lucky to get their jobs, etc. In your world, there's no skill at all involved in success. It's precisely the world view one adopts when they fully embrace Marxist theories. Individual actions can't matter, not because they don't, but because you're advocating eliminating any reward for them and it is more difficult to do so if people believe that their actions do matter in terms of their outcomes. It's the basic fundamental assumption lying at the ultimate core of everything you believe in. It's a cart before the horse approach, but then that's common on your side of the political fence.


CEOs are just an obvious and easy target Smash, but hardly the only ones. After all, never forget that the true enemy of the proletariat is not the rich, but the middle class (or even the concept of a middle class). If people believe that they can succeed by their own actions, then they'll be less likely to join the cause for government imposed equality. People only want enforced equality if they believe they'll never be above average. The trick is convincing a majority of a population that they have no chance of ever achieving that. This is why you use that narrative Smash.

Edited, Feb 7th 2013 4:17pm by gbaji

Yeah. It kinda is. You've been spouting this narrative for as long as you've been posting here. White people were just lucky to pop out of the right ******, successful people were just lucky to get their jobs, etc. In your world, there's no skill at all involved in success. It's precisely the world view one adopts when they fully embrace Marxist theories. Individual actions can't matter, not because they don't, but because you're advocating eliminating any reward for them and it is more difficult to do so if people believe that their actions do matter in terms of their outcomes. It's the basic fundamental assumption lying at the ultimate core of everything you believe in. It's a cart before the horse approach, but then that's common on your side of the political fence.

1. I'm not a Marxist.

2. You have exactly zero idea what "Marxist" means.

3. Contrary to the 1950's straw man version you seem to embrace (who knows why), individual achievement is fully embraced and actually required by socialism. Without it, it fails as a viable economic system. What isn't embraced, however, is the backward looking *granting of achievement* based on results. That's idiotic. That's not how any rational system should work. One of the lazier big lies of capitalism is that people get rich because they know more or work harder, etc. They don't.

By and large, they get rich because of luck. Not sure why that's so hard for you to deal with. In the US caste system, which class you're born into correlates with which class you die in at around .9. No other factor comes even vaguely close. Not ideology, little buddy, just math. Again with the math. Maybe you should take a high school statistics class or something?

Points for tact, I suppose.

A CEO's job is not to design products.

Including Steve Jobs. It's to file for patents for Johnny Ive's work. THAT'S a CEO's job.

Who ironically are mostly our middle-class neighbors.

Haha, no. How quaint that you think so.

Yeah, the problem is that without Steve Jobs, Apple doesn't really have that visionary any more. They're floundering. What do they do now, but continue to release incremental upgrades to their phones?

That's not to say Jobs was perfect - the Cube was his idea and it flopped. But he kept a tight reign on product development and heads rolled when he wasn't happy, and he minimized mistakes for the most part (the antenna debacle notwithstanding.) More importantly, he knew how to hype up products like nobody else, to the point where the Apple fanboys drooled at the mere mention of a new thing.

Then what's the first thing that happens after he's gone? Apple Maps.

Just because it was the first thing I came across, now down to 54% of Americans from 65% at the start of recession. That's still a lot of us.

Hi. You said something you thought was right and it turned out to be wrong. It happens. Not a big deal. Happens to me all the time. Don't be someone who has to defend his wrong position through wilder and wilder justifications and backpedaling. We have that guy, already. One is plenty.

Seriously. Don't be that guy. The "middle class" even including pension funds and retirement etc owns a miniscule fraction of publicly held companies in the US. Unless you define "middle class" as including people with 8 figure net worth.

Sure, but your original post is obviously not referring to that:

quote]Besides we're supposed to abuse our employees and pass the savings on to our customers so it will enrich our stock holders. Who ironically are mostly our middle-class neighbors. We'll complain about our ridiculous working conditions with them while wondering if our retirement package is going to grow fast enough to get us out of the workforce on time.

Things are connected people![/quote]

What's relevant to this? Who controls and benefits from the decisions to cut worker pay etc and thus who has control of the company. If a hundred guys have 100 shares each and one has a million, most shareholders in the company might be middle-class - but the one who counts isn't.

Let me be clear. This is the most charitable reading possible of your post as well as the one which makes most sense. If you did not intend to claim that most shareholders are middle-class then you are not simpy mistaken as to a fact, as we all are from time to time, but you're basing your rant on a completely irrelevant statistic. That is to say, you can't reason for ****. This is the reason why this kind of ********* is so ridiculous when gbaji pulls it; even if it were believable, it only makes him look worse.

How many are "so many"? Perception isn't reality. The overwhelming majority of CEOs make their money while employing thousands of people and providing them better benefits and pay than they would likely get anywhere else in an environment where their skills and marketability will increase over time. The problem with CEOs is that they are the target of many on the left who will single out the rare exception and make it seem like the rule.



Just checked the list of the 25 highest paid CEOs in the US. Not one of them runs a service industry company. I think I counted one that ran an auto parts company, and one who ran a raw materials (copper, gold, lead, etc) company, so I suppose that's "close". I imagine you're talking about like McDonalds, or Macy's or something though, right? Not on the list.

Again, I suspect the problem is that most people have an incredibly skewed view of what corporations really do and how they really work. You see the small handful that the media puts in front of you and constantly tells you are terrible for this, that, and the other thing, while ignoring the overwhelmingly positive work experiences of millions of Americans who work for various corporations, most of which you've never heard of and don't even enter your radar screen in terms of your view of corporate America. It's not remotely like what you think.



I'm sure that thousands of hours of media talking heads telling you this is what's informing your assumption though. Again, perception and reality are not the same thing.

Corporate America is just the return of Fascism. Capitalism by nature spawns fascism. Free markets controlled by the select few, with the influence to buy the people they need to buy. Hitler was a patsy,,,not diminishing the atrocities he committed with the power bought for him. **** Germany was a marriage of the corporations and the state.

The same is occurring across the free market world. Slowly but surely entire markets are consumed by few organizations of people. Fascism fled Germany and found a new home in America, and used its influence to spread it throughout the world. The media spins what the small groups dictate. They use buzz words like Socialism,Communism, and apparently Rush uses Marxism (cite: Gbaji). While the argument it is socialist is some what valid. They natural enemy of Socialism (equality) is Fascism (control) it makes perfect sense that the media is staunch supporters of anti socialist propaganda.

The same tactics were used by German media leading to the rise of the **** party, and the eventual destruction of the communist party in Germany. Ironically enough the wealthiest of Germans, Americans, and British, chose a social workers party, the very kind they sought to destroy. Some believe the **** party was set up to fail because it could later be said Socialist Politics cause this, Go propaganda.

The fact that the worker is under represented in the west is disturbing. Money is constantly being moved up the pyramid to the top. Less and less hands control the wealth of our entire societies. Some folks think this is fair, these people worked for it! So can you. When in reality the super rich, the guys who can afford to pull all the punches. The descendants of the perpetrators of the 1929 Stock Crash, the financial backers of WW2 to all major parties, the very people who walked away with billions of untraced public funds in 2008/9. Now the public not only bailed them out, but also has to repay them the money because many of these super rich families are share holders of the Federal Reserve. America owes money to the very people who the money was given.

Consolidation of wealth. While the worker scrapes by.

Edited, Feb 9th 2013 2:41am by rdmcandie