Suppose you are the CEO of a company. During your sixteen years in charge, the company's profits have dramatically increased. Your share-holders and employees are well compensated, and your customer base has grown significantly. There is, though, a problem. There have been rumors of illegal conduct for years--assertions that, if true, would go some way to explaining how it is that your company was able to do so well. But happy with the increasing profits and the satisfaction of customers and employees alike, you simply ignored them. Eventually, the evidence of the truth of the rumors became overwhelming and you were threatened with legal action. So a decade after the first audible whispers of wrong-doing were heard, you make a few cosmetic changes. This staves off the lawyers for a time, but with the mounting evidence of illegal activity and the superficiality of the initial reforms, they come back. Eventually, you agree to an indepedent review of the allegations. With only a very few exceptions, your employees refuse to cooperate with the investigation. Even so, when the report is completed, over 80 of your employees have been reported as engaging in illegal activity that directly relates to job performance. Furthermore, any reasonable person will extrapolate from this and conclude that a great many others (perhaps more than half) of your employees are or were guilty of the same. When this report becomes public, what would you expect your future with the company to be? Not bright, I'd say. But if you are Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and your bosses are just happy to be making money hand-over-fist, you get a three-year extension to your $15 million annual contract.
So much for accountability.
4 comments:
Tom, (your blog was, I felt, the best place for this)
Thanks for alerting me to my created confusion over on the CC blog! Even though we rarely (never?) agree, I appreciate the civil dialogue. For the future, I'm really not that deep. After all, I'm a kolledge stoodent. If you have to think too hard about points that I make then either you are missing a broader theme or I wrote it poorly. Most likely the latter. ;)
After reading your blog entry (on Bud) my parenthetical question in the above comment is retracted.
I agree with you on this one!
:)
Sad and dead-on accurate.
Thanks for the comments, Sarah and Fab. I was really disappointed (although not terribly surprised) that the owners extended Bud's contract. The problem is that baseball's commissioner serves at the pleasure of the owners. This pretty well ensures that their interests will always be of first concern in the commissioner's office.
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