#128 What's an Executive Worth? (2005)

During a recent NPR business-babble program, Weekend Edition, Bill Catlin asked numbskull "expert, Jim Sillery, an executive compensation consultant, if executives were "worth" the idiotic salaries they receive for mismanaging over-stuffed American Misfortune 500 disaster zones.  This brilliant question was inspired by the recent Fannie Mae accounting mismanagement fiasco, which was preceded by ENRON and a few hundred similar incidents of gross and corrupt mismanagement in the last few years.  Of course, Sillery assured Catlin that boards of directors only pay what they "need" to pay to get the "talent" their companies require.  Talent?  Need?  What would a couple of stuffed suits who never worked an honest day in their lives know about talent or need? 

NPR's "business" program morphed into an equally silly discussion between Scott Simon and Fortune magazine editor Joe Nocera.  They continued the fanzine babble over the wonders of executive inspiration.  Spoken like the true outsider he is, Nocera pronounced Steve Jobs to be the 2004 Business Man of the Year.  Somehow, Nocera fantasized that Jobs was the Apple "founder" who's technical wizardry turned Apple into the poster-biz for rags-to-riches.  Catlin listened to this BS as uncritically as GeeWizz Bush receiving a lecture on world affairs from his puppet master, da Veepmeister. 

I would wager a good piece of spare change that neither Catlin, Sillery, Simon, or Nocera have worked on a production line, been a part of a product design team, or spent time in customer service.  At best, these four spoiled children might have had a summer job flipping burgers or pretending to be country club lifeguards.  There is no way that people with such limited useful business experience could know what a CEO "contributes" to a company, its products, the company's morale, inspiration, or daily function. 

Jobs is about as far from a tech-wiz as GeeWizz Bush.  Steve Wozniak provided the technical skills that created and still inspire Apple.  Jobs chased Wozniak out of his own company with power plays, back-stabbing, and by turning a cool, creative company into a tech sweatshop.  Jobs' claim to fame, in every Apple product, is the quickly dated "look" of Apple products.  With the same trendy vision that new cars look like old cars in two years, Jobs cranks out plastic boxes that look 50 years old by the time the next generation of products appears.  Jobs might be a marketing wiz, but he's no Woz.  He is not a technical innovator, an inspiring manager, or a creative force.  He's a political animal and there is no shortage of those in these United States.  The best analogy I've seen of Wozniak and Jobs compared them to the Beatles: Jobs was McCartney, a self-promoting pop icon with limited skills but lots of unfounded sex appeal, Wozniak is Lennon, multi-talented, ahead of his time, and completely dedicated to music and making the world a better place to live. 

Leadership is a grossly misunderstood quality.  For some reason, humans want to imagine that leaders are something you can breed and grow like pedigreed sheep.  For centuries, human cultures have gravitated toward promoting the most useless, least visionary, least talented men to the highest positions in the country.  We all know this isn't reality.  Hollywood and historians have made a living out of retelling the story that we all know to be true; that our leaders are distracted and incompetent and, without the constant assistance and supervision of critical middle management, they will drive us to ruin.  Crooked and doped up politicians, dimwitted kings and CEOs, loudmouthed but foolish bosses, sexist and clueless managers, and the long list of people in power who don't have the capacity or motivation to do the leading their job implies they should provide.  That's the universal stereotype for "leadership."  Writers and comedians have been working with that material for centuries. 

Cultural and corporate heroes are always the rare born leader who spends his time leading and doing the work that needs doing, instead of politicking, stuffing knives into backs, and avoiding useful work.  The fools who rise to the top of the corporate and political ladder are excess baggage with ambition.  They don't care who they hurt, how much damage they do to their culture and associates (they rarely have friends), or what happens to the business or country they mismanage after they receive their golden parachutes or are assassinated (politically or actually). Claiming that these men are critical to a company's success is as clueless as imagining that Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union or that Bill Clinton created the Information Society.  Just because they were sitting at the top of the pile when those things happened is no evidence that they were any part of the cause or the effect.

The myth survives because, rarely, a real leader actually ends up on top of the heap.  When that happens, the lucky heap is massively stronger than other heaps.  Microsoft is that kind of company and we all know how popular that company's leader is.  Human herds do not like people who actually are smarter than the average dull upper-crust wit.  But when a company or a culture does well, that isn't an indication of that kind of luck.  It's most often a different sort of happenstance.  The kind that is driven from somewhere less visible but more typical.  Most companies can get along fine without any of their deadbeat executives, but no company can survive without middle management, customer service, and the rest of the folks who actually do work.

January 2005

#75 Irrational Arguments in Irrational Times (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

For my first rant, post killing off my newsletter, I've decided to change my format.  I used to work at "doing a column," creating a consistent train of thoughts on a single topic.  Screw that.  I'm branching out into random thoughts on any damn thing that crosses my mind.  And here we go.

I recently wasted a few moments listening to Myles Brand, the President of the NCAA (The National Collegiate Athletics Association, for those of you who have more useful things on your mind.), excuse the self-serving aristocratic behavior of the folks who administrate college athletics to the folks who rationalize that behavior to the rest of us; the press.  One of the questions this esteemed educator fielded from the peanut gallery was "what do you think about athletes who go straight from high school directly into professional basketball?"

The Pres responded by using Labron James as an example.  James is a high school wunderkind basketball player who is entering this year's NBA draft and will be making more money than a hospital full of doctors before he's old enough to drink beer.  Mr. Brand advised the kid to go to the pros, make as much money as he can, and get a college degree on the side.  According to Mr. NCAA, a college degree is a necessity if James is going to "have a happy life." 

I've heard a bag of reasons for a college degree, but this might the first time I've heard happiness and a college education linked.  From my own experience, I can't imagine how Brand could hope to prove that college and happiness even have a passing acquaintance. 

In the last half-dozen  decades, universities have worked hard to link themselves to financial success.  As college education prices have leapt out of the reach of everyone but the ruling elites' offspring, the focus of that education has become financial with minimal intellectual associations.  The concept of "a liberal education" has fallen into disrepute and even conservatives would have a hard time keeping a straight face while tying the current "conservative education" to a happy life.  Since the overwhelming majority of working people dislike, or hate, their work lives, the connection between education, work, and happiness is as disassociated as the reasons middle class folks vote Republican. 

While I'm picking on conservatives and education, the ultimate conservative catbox liner, the UK's Economist, recently provided its readers with an article praising the ascendance of "conservative think tanks."  This is a concept that is tough to take seriously.  A "think tank" that focuses on unoriginal thoughts intended to preserve the status quo.  While that does sound incredibly English, it's not the kind of organization that inspires visions of ground-breaking intellectual accomplishment.  While no one can honestly argue that it is impossible to be conservative and intelligent, being intelligent is not the primary requirement for original thinking.  Being conservative is contradictory to creativity. 

In the first years of this new century, conservative think tanks are doing quite well.  Their big tasks are explaining to the rest of us how trickle-down economics are going to work "this time" and why the fight we've picked with Iraq is "not a war about oil."  Conservatives have a vested interest in trickle-down, since the theory is when the rich get richer the poor will get some of the spillage; not exactly an intellectual exercise in economic calculus.  I'd be astounded if the majority of think tankers are not trust fund babies.  Rich kids arguing that they should be allowed to stay rich in the interests of those who are struggling to survive.  That argument always reminds me of a Green Peace booth I saw years ago.  It was staffed by the fattest woman I've ever seen in my life and their banner read "save the whales."  And I wondered . . . which sort of whale are we referring to?

The not-about-oil war arguments have been considerably more entertaining in recent weeks.  One of my favorites is that the Bush crowd couldn't be waging a war for their oil interests because oil is only one faction of the economy.  This argument has several variations, but I've heard it so often that it appears to be taking on veneer of credibility.  The conservative think tanks' best friends are conservative media who don't question any argument that comes from old money.  So the rest of us are left to decipher some meaning from the Bush-babble.

The flaw in this irrational argument is the hilarious assumption that Bush was elected by, and represents all of, all citizens and American economic interests.  A tiny number of interests provided GeeWiz with his financing, mostly oil and other viciously corrupt special interests, and an embarrassing minority of citizens voted for him.  Bush and Co. do not have to represent the majority of economic, political, or social interests to do the job they were elected to do.  Therefore, it's entirely possibly that a war on Iraq is precisely about oil.  Or only about oil.

All three of these irrational concepts are intended to make the rich richer and keep the rest of us in our place.  It's only logical that the rich want to hang on to their power and money, but it's not rational for the working class to want to help them.  When the have-nots want to protect the haves, conservative thinking has overwhelmed logic and self-interest.  The next step is to rejoin the United Kingdom and  sing "God Save the Queen." 

One of the favorite conservative catch-phrases, when they find themselves accused of pandering to the rich and powerful, is "class warfare."  In their minds, class warfare is supposed to be waged in only one direction; the rich putting it to the poor.  Somehow, they have managed to equate the poor fighting back with communism or socialism or liberalism or anti-Disney-ism.  Some damn thing that we're all supposed to hate as Americans.  The fact is, America was founded on class warfare.  The revolutionary war was nothing if not violent class warfare, taking up arms to defeat England's entrenched class system that had no business existing let alone migrating to the "new world."  Following that, by 100 years, we fought among ourselves to defeat the ultimate class system, slavery.  It's not hard to see how WWIIl, the great war fought by the self-proclaimed "greatest generation," as yet another class war.  The master race vs the rest of the world.  The master race got its master butt kicked and Americans returned to segregation, impoverished inner cities, and growing corporate power and influence.  Still, a good class war is always a big part of the American way.  I can always hope and I always do.

CornFairy.com "a leader in the search for innovative executives."  That's who the announcer on my Public Radio station said had sponsored the evening news.  Finally, truth in advertising.  I'm not an expert in mythology, but I'd assume a corn fairy is something like a tooth fairy.  So, this is a company that gets paid for hunting an imaginary creature.  Sort of like hunting snipes, but getting money to do it. 

I wonder what sort of company would hire a corn fairy hunting consultant?  General Motors seems like a likely customer.  GM isn't even a real company, having turned in profit losing tax returns for the last ten zillion years while finding the cash to over pay it's own corn fairies in salaries, stock options, and outright handouts.  Executive pensions at GM cost the company nearly $100,000,000 per year and that's an expense that isn't likely to shrink in the next decade or two.  I'm sure the corn fairy can help them find even more ways to squander GM's stockholder investments.  A room full of retards could do as well as the existing GM executive selection process.  What's that old statistical proverb?  Something about an infinite number of monkeys, typing at an infinite number of typewriters, will in an infinite amount of time, eventually, crank out a Shakespearian sonnet.  That's about the kind of still GM has shown in selecting CEOs.  Does anyone believe GM will exist long enough to find an intelligent exec with this system?

I'm tired, you're tired, the economy is smashed, and we're all going broke "saving the world" for international oil corporations.  Amerika, what a country.

June, 2003

Why I Don't Give Money to NPR

First, I have friends who work for Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and they are wonderful people who are doing the right thing for the right reason. They aren't the problem, they work for the problem. If public radio's mismanagement somehow managed to shoot the organization in the foot, that foot became infected, and the institution died, my friends would miss the jobs they had, the mission they thought they were serving, and the community they tried to serve would be lessened by their loss. I once worked for Guidant Corporation. Many people working inside many giant disorganizations have higher goals, a sense of mission, hopes to be providing value and, even, saving lives with the company's products. Having been in meetings with the Guidant executives and hearing their concerns, I know the company's employees who had morals and values would have been disappointed to learn that their mismanagers are rarely more sophisticated or motivated any differently than other white collar criminals. Like most white collar criminals, they got away with a fortune and no responsibility for the wreckage they left behind. Law enforcement doesn't have the skills, the funding, or the interest in pursuing corporate criminals unless they screw up and steal from the 1%.The fact is, good people often work for for evil people because they (the good people) are incredible optimists and hope for the best in face of all evidence.

When my kids were young, 35 years ago, we listened to Nebraska Public Radio a lot. They grew up listening to great BBC and US radio programs like the Monty Python Show, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Zero Hour, Le Show, Earplay, NPR Playhouse, A Prairie Home Companion, and rebroadcasts of old US radio dramas like Johnny Dollar and Suspense. We didn't have a television in the house and NPR was important to our household for all of our electronic media entertainment, news, and just to pass the time. College interns who worked in my lab learned to talk Hitchhiker's Guide dialog to communicate. We ran the program every day and there was damn little conversation in the lab while the show was on. When the local station reran the Pythons, we had listening parties where most of the party'ers could quote the lines; accent intact. From 1973 to 2000, I was a reliable contributor to my local Public Radio stations; from Lincoln, Nebraska to Santa Monica, California, to Denver, Colorado, to St. Paul, Minnesota. Even when we didn't have much money, we always found a couple hundred dollars to give to our local stations.

The 90's were the beginning of the end for NPR. Along with the phony morals outrage about Clinton's blow jobs, the Repuglicans were hammering at the "liberal bias" of public media, doing everything they could to eliminate any public funding on media not firmly on their side. To Repuglicans, "liberal" means anything reality-based. Federal funding dropped and, to make up for the loss of revenue, National Public Radio began to take on corporate advertising, disguised as "sponsorships." Those sponsorships and the fear NPR's mismanagement had that their oversized salaries might be impacted by even less federal investment in public information have shifted the information we get dramatically. (Yes, I know their annual salaries are barely a week's coffee allowance for Rush, Beck, and the MSM regular talking heads. But I don't listen to those idiots at all, ever.) My first strong impression of Minnesota Public radio's (MPR) shift was when Jesse Ventura was running for Minnesota Governor. Ventura was "allowed" about one word out of ten, compared to his Democratic and Repuglican opponents. Four years later, the candidate Ventura recommended for his replacement, Tim Penny, wasn't even allowed to participate in the MPR debates. It was obvious that MPR belonged to the two parties and the state's corporations and my interest in "local radio" has declined in direct proportion to local radio's disinterest in local communities. The bigger the public radio organization becomes, the less connected to the local community they are.

For years, I have used Public Radio as my wake-up alarm. For the last ten years, that has mostly served to get me out of bed pissed off. In the 2006-2007 period, hearing NPR's "financial experts" jabber about how our failing, phoney economy was in great shape because home ownership was at an all-time high did that job. This year, the non-stop conservative commentary and propaganda is putting on the finishing touches. A few days ago, I woke up to what was purported to be a random selection of uncommitted voters in Ohio. What they interviewed were several die-hard Romney idiots, including one bimbo who was voting for Romney because Ryan "is cute." If that's the most non-committed NPR can get, they might as well become a Faux News subsidiary.

And that is why I can ignore NPR's constant begging for money without a blip on my conscience. I know a pile of crap when I hear it. I know that Minnesota Public Radio has enough money to acquire every available small radio station several states through its American Public Radio subsidiary. I know that I miss the real "public radio," the radio stations that were closely connected to local communities and gave us a load of local information with a little national BS and even more international news; lots of BBC, some CBC, and I felt closer to my community because of it. I don't get that from the conglomerates that NPR, APR, and MPR have become. I miss public radio, though.