Comment by mostlysimilar
12 days ago
More companies need to learn to treat their employees like an asset instead of a liability. Executives are far less valuable than the boots on the ground actually running the businesses. Take care of those people and they will take care of you.
We can thank Jack Welch and the MBAs who aim to be like him. Loyalty is a two-way street.
We can also thank Lewis F. Powell, Milton Friedman, Paul Weyrich, and others of their ilk.
I'd be interested to see a clip of Milton Friedman saying that executives are the most valuable employees.
6 replies →
How about Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher.
1 reply →
A MBA program is the equivalent of installing wormable malware into the human mind.
https://youtu.be/vEWGrc0eHLw
Interesting video. When I got an economics degree, there was a lot of discussion about externalities. The focus was something like “here’s what we can model, here’s what we can’t. Be careful, because the stuff outside your model can really matter!”
Then the conversation moves on to how to build better models that integrate a more complicate understanding of the world we live in and our effects on it. This is why the Carbon Tax is/was such an interesting concept. It’s an attempt to enhance the financial system with the ability to price in climate change.
Fundamentally, Economics is about make good decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. Certainly the Lords of Finance have taken it to some pathological places, but prices and markets remain extremely powerful tools.
One great example of this is how Feeding America created a market to allocate foodstuffs among food banks:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/09/11/565736836/epis...
1 reply →
> More companies need to learn to treat their employees like an asset instead of a liability. Executives are far less valuable than the boots on the ground actually running the businesses. Take care of those people and they will take care of you.
Hey hey, think about the poor executive. Toil and grind until they lay you off. That 3rd yacht isn't going to buy itself.
To be fair, the job of executive and especially CEO is extremely demanding because evaluating executive performance is nearly impossible. To say nothing of legal liability and popular opprobrium.
Any random event can sink a company, and the CEO will be blamed for not foreseeing and preparing for it. Good times can carry your company along even if their policies suck. Bad times can kill a great company with great leadership. Which means bad CEOs can sometimes go for years without the feedback they need to get better, and great CEOs will never get the recognition they deserve.
Some measures of good leadership are concrete and measurable, but lots are very abstract and only manifest over years and decades. So if a CEO does a great job at these, the profits might only show up for their successor, or even their successor.
I'd only do that job for a ton of money.