[extropy-chat] You're Fired

[The Avantguardian]

--- BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some directors will be lucky to be in the right
> place at the right
> time and some won't.  There are only a very few
> directors whose
> decisions have much effect on company performance.
> Usually in new,
> fast-moving sectors where rapid change is paramount.

If you are right and that is the case, then there is
no justification whatsoever to huge CEO salaries. Cap
their salaries at ten times the salary of the average
employee and use the savings to pay the shareholders
dividends.  

> The vast majority of company directors are of the
> type "I've worked 10
> years to get my snout into the trough and I'm going
> to make the most
> of it." (Because everyone else does it as well). 
> Then they
> concentrate on PR, keeping their lucrative
> employment, increasing
> their stock options, accumulating huge pension
> funds, and ensuring
> huge payoffs for terminating their employment.

If their decisions make NO DIFFERENCE in the
performance of the company, they are no more worthy
than the middle manager who devotes thirty years of
his life to a company only to get a meager pension and
gold watch.

> 
> Company staff voting is a much better system for
> controlling the
> excesses of the board. If the company staff are also
> the shareholders,
> you get the best of all possible worlds.  ;)

This might work although I worry that such will still
suffer the problem of becoming a popularity contest.
At least a market model would be presumambly more
objective if less nimble.



Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much."

- P. T. Barnum

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