Reply #17: Here's my theory ... [View All]

[RoyGBiv]

For most companies, in order to become a CEO, you have to work yourself up through a system of utter bullshit presenting a profile of a person who knows how to make an immediate profit. The "immediate" part is important because you're working for someone who wants that immediate profit or positive balance sheet for either a particular quarter or fiscal year and throws the task to you to get it done. By the time you yourself become the CEO, you have been indoctrinated into this mindset. Lower and mid-level managers all thing of current fiscal problems, not long term. By the time you're into a position where you should be thinking long-term, you forget how.

By the time you're the Big Boss (and never mind that most people never get there ... the people who make the decisions all want to get there and work toward it) you're, at best, in your late 50s. You want to retire soon. You have a contract that sets you for life if, and only if, you meet a certain set of numbers for the stockholders. You gear the entire company's organization toward making those numbers. What happens after means nothing to you. You have your money are are retired and/or have moved on to your next conquest.

People do not think long-term. It interferes with personal goals. When you're in the position of actually making a decision that affects the company's future, you're looking at just a few years before you personally want to go off and try to enjoy what's left of your life after having subsumed most of it to reaching this point. Perhaps you've lately realized you fucked up and that all that time you spent away from family was wasted. You've become a humanitarian even. That only makes it worse. You want out as soon as you can, but you're accustomed to a level of living and want to maintain it. You do what you have to do, not thinking for one moment about those whose livelihood relies on your decisions, and you go with that.

I think this is a summary of the world's problems entirely in a nutshell. Perhaps that's arrogant, but it's what I'm left with after having dealt with these games for several decades now and never having had any desire to be that Big Boss.