Pay for Performance 0

D-Day takes a look at the corporate bonus culture:

The decoupling of risk and profit is the issue here. Corporate titans never rise and fall on the merit of their superior intellect, and there has been a great shift to mke sure profits, both personal and corporate, are kept in private hands, while the risk is socialized. When times are flush nobody really cares about or at least pays attention to this; when the same people who wrecked the economy feel entitled to their ungodly profits, people get understandably upset.

The reasoning in the corporate boardrooms is actually pretty simpleminded:

1. I am the CEO/CFO/whatever.

2. I therefore must be a Master of the Universe.

3. I therefore am entitled to All that I Can Get.

They believe this reasoning even as the facts–all those arrows slanting downward to the right on all those charts–the facts of the business show that they couldn’t tie someone in a game of tic-tac-toe without phenomenal luck and chicanery.

Those who complain about an “entitlement society” are looking in the wrong direction. The sense of entitlement is not walking on the streets, not pumping gas in service stations nor building product in factories, not helping customers on the sales floor, not in the Bushie breadlines.

The sense of entitlement is in empty suits in fancy offices on the top floors of all those buildings in the center of town.