Over the years I’ve subscribed to a whole slew of magazines, including, in no particular order, Boy’s Life, Baseball Digest, The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Business Week, ComputerWorld, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, Harpers, The Atlantic, and Fortune. A few years back I let the Forbes, Fortune and Business Week subscriptions lapse, but I’d been reading them for about 10 years. In all that time, I don’t recall (and maybe I’m wrong) those three corporate titans being particularly interested in muckraking journalism, at least about their principal subjects. So imagine my surprise when I saw that the cover stories of this week’s Fortune are devoted to exposing some of the tricks CEOs have been using to inflate share prices, enrich themselves, and otherwise comport themselves less than admirably.
Take a look at the cover:
Then read the story and the sidebars. If that doesn’t give you some concern about the ethics of some members of the Fortune 500, I’ll be surprised. I wonder if it’s similar to the way star athletes seem to think rules aren’t for them; they’re selected early as potential up-and-comers, generally admired and praised, and their faults and errors dismissed.
I work for a US company and apparently our old CEO got $60,000,000+ when all his bonuses, shares etc were all totted up last year. This at a time when the company’s share price is plummeting and amongst constant messages that our pay will be frozen, there will be no bonuses etc. He’s just been given the golden boot which was worth tens of millions of dollars. I wish I got paid that much for beeing good at my job, never mind for being bad at it!