I remember getting downvoted then flagged for making a reasonable argument against a bunch of employees from Tesla unionising.
While its not exactly a vindication, I feel super vindicated right now and I'm not gonna be reasonable this time.
These companies have no way out, they are going to die! All these people will lose their livelihood and worse their options to monetise their skillset/experience will be next to zero. Is this your utopia?!
I've been researching Ford for a while, they have so much debt and an extremely small margin for error for the EV transition. It was gonna be so tight and now their fate is sealed.
I'm not proud of this but a part of me find a bit of joy in what comes next. There is this Thanos side of me that feels like a grave injustice have been done here. These people have no right to have this much power over a company.
You really think a CEO isn't worth 300-400x more than a line worker? Honestly I can't fathom that level of ignorance/cognitive-dissonance.
Replace CEO with any sort of leadership role in any kind of organisation/entity with skin in the game (where outcomes can hurt). Whether if its football coaches, generals, head of state etc.
I know nobody (sane) disputes the difference between a c-suite employee vs a line worker but what I'm talking about is the exponential nature.
These people are barely human. Imagine the stakes, the leverage, the consequences and the sheer amount of context you need. Being in the top percentile of IQ, EQ, competence, industriousness etc are just tablestakes. You need to be ruthless while at the same time have an immense capacity for empathy. You need to be extremely conscientious/industrious while at the same time having a large reservoir of creativity. Its like the infinity stones, you can't just be a galaxy brain or just have the gift of the gab or be a psycopath. You need it all and more while competing against people just like you for rarified roles.
To top it off, all of this just gets you into the ring, you also need to actually win and win consistently over period of time. Usually this requires sacrificing your entire life. Btw this where the barely human part comes in, these people thrive on this. All these CEOs have enough money to retire on a beautiful ranch or oceanfront mansion, instead they work 70 hour weeks.
And you think these people are somewhat similar to the guy who screws in car parts? You think society should value these people in somewhat the same realm? like a linear nature (50% or 300% more).
This kind of thinking is what leads to the end of civilisations. These people should be revered. We should be grateful.
I still can't accept there are people in the world who think its somewhat similar. This is not an IQ thing, its not even a being well read thing.. This is common sense.
We all have met people in our lives where we go "oh there are level to this game", like freaks of nature.
How can you not think its the same for you know, leading a multi billion dollar public corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees.. Its mind boggling. How can people no see the asymmetry!
Some executives are as you say. In general, those companies which are lead by executives like that are leaders and produce high quality and innovative products that people love.
But many execs are not. They work just as obsessively as the first type, but only to increase their own power inside of the organization, at the expense of the organization's cohesion, trust, productivity, and quality. They live in a bubble, totally disconnected from the organization's purpose. They make strategic mistakes over and over again. They fail to truly understand why even a single dollar of revenue happens; instead they take it as a given that the money is coming in and only think of ways their unit can siphon off more of it, at the expense of all the others.
If just one of these type 2's enters your organization, you can typically get by, as long as you recognize them quickly enough. If even a small handful enter your C-suite, they will metastasize, cause your type 1's to leave, and put your org on a death spiral.
Many execs are of the second type. You can tell: if you use a product or service, and it sucks, that's probably what's going on at the top.
I tend to agree with you. I was generalising quite a bit for the sake of conciseness (& being a little cheeky)
Its not uncommon to see people in these roles because of nepotism, they write the checks or they are good at short term games (machiavellian, gift of the gab, office politics).
That said, such exceptions tend to not last long because of the unstable nature of these situations.
In other words, those who match the description I made earlier tend to eat these peoples lunch given enough time.
Yes the CEO should make more, but where do you get off that a single individual can possibly do 300-400x more work than another individual. It is sheer absurdity of an opinion to hold.
In a civilized society I would say maxing out the top paid employee of a company to 20-30x of the average of the salaries of the bottom half of all salaries in the company is what should be done. Anything more than that creates a system of perverse incentives to take action that is against the greater good of the community.
I tried to address this in the latter part of my post.
I'll start by saying there is a lot of nuance here with cases where I might even agree with you but I'm going set aside nuance in service of getting to the core of my point.
The guy who pushes around a trolley, unpacks a box of goods and puts it in the shelfs of a local branch of a nation wide grocery chain is not just worth 30x less than the CEO of that multi billion dollar grocery chain.
The key distinction here is that the difference isn't just linear, its non linear with a steep gradient. You can replace that guy with a 12 year old disabled girl and it would make almost no different to outcome for the multi billion dollar grocery chain.
Whereas if you hired a slightly less competent/experienced CEO and I mean like 0.5% less, the difference is tens or even hundreds of millions.
The non linear nature to this is not just something to do with humans, its a natural phenomenon. Its the Pareto principle & distribution.
Maybe things can be in the realm of 20-30x when we are talking about CEO vs the rest of the C-suite.
P.S. Just to directly address your civilised society claim: There is nothing civilised about the proletariat or their puppeteers dictating by fiat how far high a person can fly before their wings get chopped off. Btw in such a society, those who chose are an order of magnitude more powerful than the most richest and powerful in our current society. You just replaced one set of elites who "atleast" "somewhat" earned their station with another set of elites whos only skill is in being a good orator.
Also Akida Toyoda made $6.9m last year, and Toyota is larger than any of the US companies by a wide margin in every metric, while bringing in more net income. How do these US CEO's calculate their worth as 5x as much for smaller less profitable companies? It's avarice clear as day.
Dear sir, Akida Toyada very very surprisingly unbeknownst nobody just so happens to be the grandson of this random guy Kiichiro Toyoda who shockingly was the founder of Toyota Motors.
Just do you know I'm using all the restraint I have in me to not question your mental capacity using slurs (pls don't ban-ish me señor Dang, grant me this sentence).
While its not exactly a vindication, I feel super vindicated right now and I'm not gonna be reasonable this time.
These companies have no way out, they are going to die! All these people will lose their livelihood and worse their options to monetise their skillset/experience will be next to zero. Is this your utopia?!
I've been researching Ford for a while, they have so much debt and an extremely small margin for error for the EV transition. It was gonna be so tight and now their fate is sealed.
I'm not proud of this but a part of me find a bit of joy in what comes next. There is this Thanos side of me that feels like a grave injustice have been done here. These people have no right to have this much power over a company.
You really think a CEO isn't worth 300-400x more than a line worker? Honestly I can't fathom that level of ignorance/cognitive-dissonance.
Replace CEO with any sort of leadership role in any kind of organisation/entity with skin in the game (where outcomes can hurt). Whether if its football coaches, generals, head of state etc.
I know nobody (sane) disputes the difference between a c-suite employee vs a line worker but what I'm talking about is the exponential nature.
These people are barely human. Imagine the stakes, the leverage, the consequences and the sheer amount of context you need. Being in the top percentile of IQ, EQ, competence, industriousness etc are just tablestakes. You need to be ruthless while at the same time have an immense capacity for empathy. You need to be extremely conscientious/industrious while at the same time having a large reservoir of creativity. Its like the infinity stones, you can't just be a galaxy brain or just have the gift of the gab or be a psycopath. You need it all and more while competing against people just like you for rarified roles.
To top it off, all of this just gets you into the ring, you also need to actually win and win consistently over period of time. Usually this requires sacrificing your entire life. Btw this where the barely human part comes in, these people thrive on this. All these CEOs have enough money to retire on a beautiful ranch or oceanfront mansion, instead they work 70 hour weeks.
And you think these people are somewhat similar to the guy who screws in car parts? You think society should value these people in somewhat the same realm? like a linear nature (50% or 300% more).
This kind of thinking is what leads to the end of civilisations. These people should be revered. We should be grateful.
I still can't accept there are people in the world who think its somewhat similar. This is not an IQ thing, its not even a being well read thing.. This is common sense. We all have met people in our lives where we go "oh there are level to this game", like freaks of nature.
How can you not think its the same for you know, leading a multi billion dollar public corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees.. Its mind boggling. How can people no see the asymmetry!