Word to Ted's #25. And weaker than Ted, but still true: if you look back to Matt's post, he isn't referring to CEOs in general, but executives strictly in the finance sector. Maybe that makes a difference to you, maybe it doesn’t.
My pithy rewording of Matt: “The buck stops where the bucks stopped.”
C’mon, you know you love it. It’s pithy! Who doesn’t like pith?
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I stopped there in the comment, and dragging past the punchline is a mistake, but I CAN'T HELP IT. I know. My loquaciousness disgusts even me.
To explicate further, the idiom about "the buck", where it stops and where it is passed, is sometimes used to mean the blame, and rhetoric about credit and blame is what the original post was about. But, especially in terms of policy and corporate bailouts or whatever, I usually think of "the buck" to mean the responsibility, which is not the same thing.
If I run a company, and some employee mistreats a customer, I might know nothing about it, had no control over it, couldn't've predicted it, etc. I'm not to blame. But it's up to me to do something about it. It's my responsibility, and if I don't want to be responsible for messes I didn't cause, then I shouldn't've taken the "running the company" job.
The topic that came up in the comments thread (that Ted's 25 pointed out was off the topic of the original post) was about CEOs and why they get paid so much. An analogy to pro athletes came up, which I think is generally appropriate. As I see it, pro athletes get paid high salaries because there's a small supply of people with their talents, their careers are short (partly because that rare performance level can't be maintained in the face of aging), and there's a high risk that a career might get cut off even sooner due to injury.
Elite business executives presumably get paid high salaries because there's a small supply of people with their talents, although the requisite skills are extremely hard to measure. My impression is that CEOs have much longer careers than athletes on average. Is their income at high risk also?
I think it generally is, and that's as it should be. Top-level execs of big companies have responsibility for lots of things, including things that they don't have complete control over. Sometimes things are going to go south on them, and they're going to suffer for it, whether it's really their fault or not.
Ah, there's the rub.
They don't always seem to suffer for it, do they?
And I really think they should. Not because they're to blame; sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, but it doesn't matter. They're getting paid orders of magnitude more than other employees putatively because they took responsibility. If they're not willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune -- there's _lots_ of people who'll take that job, and greater supply implies lower prices.
Unless the whole thing is a clever scam from the start. If everyone thinks you've got big responsibilities, then they'll pay you for that risk. And if in fact you don't take responsibility, then there's no actual risk, and they're paying you for nothing, which is the best kind of work. But that's crazy talk, right?
