"Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."
They know what accountability is. That's why they never use the word.
Yeah we know you're responsible for it, but how are you being held accountable for it?
No one will remember in two years time, but my hope is it'll factor into candidates' decisions around whether to pursue a career with Stripe. If I've got senior executives without accountability, it's a distraction to my ability to deliver the product as well as to lead my own teams supporting their vision because it means I can't rely on them, and this outcome with absolutely no accountability behind it is a good enough reason for me to never want to join Stripe in the future.
Not a CEO, but I'm reminded of the incident on a Navy vessel that struck a fishing boat and resulted in a number of fatalities. The captain was actually off the vessel at the time and not in charge. He still resigned because he was accountable to the decision on who he left in charge.
(Tbf, I'm sure he was told to resign. But that's largely because the Navy has tried to institute a culture of accountability, albeit imperfectly)
The salaries of Japanese execs are indeed tiny by US standards. However, as Kalzumeus says, instead of paying money so you can buy status, Japanese companies give status directly: company cars with drivers, company villas, very generous expense accounts, etc etc.
Remember, “companies don’t exist to make you happy. You know that, right? The business doesn’t exist to serve you. The business exists to serve your customers,” reminds McCord.
Good examples of self accountability? Sadly not. (Edit: see huffmsa for a good example)
Good examples of accountability to the board? All over. But boards care (by mandate) only about profit unless specified otherwise. There's no incentive for a board to care about whether people are put out on the street either; it's one of the major reasons for why unions exist and are successful: they provide a mechanism for accountability that ties adverse employee decisions back to future revenue loss.
Tl;Dr: nope, and that's sadly by design because why would anyone be self-accountable when the consequences hit the wallet? I was hoping for a ray of light to pierce the dark.
Unions have a range of outcomes for business success. Yes, some may hold management accountable and ultimately help companies; others screw over everyone besides long tenured employees. Suppose Stripe was unionized and somehow the union had convinced management to stop hiring in February 2022 which is the level they’re reducing headcount to now. Would the laid off employees been better off in that world without a year of Stripe employment, income, and benefits? It’s very unclear.
>somehow the union had convinced management to stop hiring in February 2022
Why would the union do this? It seems like a contrived example to prove a point. Unions would conceivably benefit from more hires because they would have more union membership.
My anecdotal experience is that unions are a massive benefit to laid-off employees. Laid off employees were given 80% pay while they waited with a known re-hire date. In other cases, they are given priority when the company is looking to rehire with an unknown rehire date. Unions have downsides, for sure, but I don't think your example points them out here.
There are plenty of unions that keep supply low. Nearly every labor union in California, for example, has underfunded apprenticeship programs for exactly this reason. I’m surprised you aren’t aware this is a phenomenon. Unions answer to their current members, and there’s plenty of incentive to keep the current membership smaller.
And my example was simply continuing the original poster’s insinuation that a union could have helped management avoid the over hiring mistake they were about to make by making the consequences of that mistake greater.
To be clear, I was technically a non-union employee in a union shop so that may explain some of my ignorance. (Most of the white collar employees were non-union. The controls engineers were in a quasi-union status without actually joining the union. It was a weird situation because of some ongoing legal battles.)
What you said does make sense though. The union apprentiships were extremely competitive, possibly because they were constrained to low numbers.
I read it as "this was our decision" as opposed to "this is our fault". Basically they are saying not to blame and middle managers, investors, board members or whatever.
I think whatever a leader does which isn’t ritual suicide when announcing layoffs is going to get criticism. People in power hired when expecting an uptick and fired when expecting a downtick.
That's kind of the fundamental problem of megawealth: You can't actually be held accountable for anything short of "ritual suicide". When a senior exec or CxO screws up, what conceivably could punish them? Lose their salary for a year? Ineffective. The wealthy make more from interest on their investments than they could ever need to live. What else could punish them? Their stock value going down? Oooh.. Mark Zuckerberg's personally lost $76B in the last 12 months, more than the entire shareholder value loss of Enron's collapse. Zucc still has so much money that an uncountable number of generations of his offspring will still never need to work again in their lives.
Why do people keep working and earning more when they are set for life--what actual practical purpose does megawealth serve once you've guaranteed your standard of living for you and your offspring? The purpose is lack of accountability. Megawealth means you can spend every remaining day of your life screwing up, and besides doing something illegal that lands you in jail, you'll never suffer a consequence.
> Why do people keep working and earning more when they are set for life--what actual practical purpose does megawealth serve once you've guaranteed your standard of living for you and your offspring?
I think this is the wrong question to ask -- "what end is this a means to anymore". One of the largest challenges in life is pursuit of meaning, and Zuck has, at least he thinks, found it. He still has consequences, but they are higher up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
You could argue that those in charge should have enough at stake to feel the burn of a layoff like this, but this issue isn't dissimilar to biology. We often make local (and temporary) sacrifices on behalf our own bodies, knowing "we" will still be around afterwards to enjoy life and the removed parts won't (removing limbs, wiping out blood cells, organ removal, etc.). This isn't 1:1 with Zuck, because Zuck is more than just his role in Meta, but close enough.
People keep working and earning more because they genuinely enjoy doing it. Would you really prefer the traditional alternative, where rich people become full-time idlers and look down their noses at those of us who have jobs?
> Would you really prefer the traditional alternative, where rich people become full-time idlers and look down their noses at those of us who have jobs?
Actually, yes, as it could open up career opportunities for others further down the totem pole. At almost every company I've ever worked, the CxO, SVP, VP roles were all hogged up by already-set-for-life people (or people who became set for life by working there a few years). They just hang on to those very senior roles like barnacles, while the rank and file fight each other their whole careers for a few open Director or manager roles.
If already-rich people could just admit they won the game and gracefully resign to "spend more time with their family" or "look down their noses" or whatever rich people like to do, maybe some of those Directors could be promoted to VPs and some of those managers could be promoted to Director and so on. This would help refresh the tree a little, cycle new blood through leadership, and help even more people climb the ladder.
No, they’re making a business decision and they should simply treat it as such and avoid the whole “please understand how hard this is for me, the guy who will continue getting a very large paycheque” thing, that makes it worse.
If they just give it to you straight, there’s no bullshit - the people fired may be mad or upset but they'll be mad or upset regardless because being fired sucks. If they start hand-wringing, talking about how painful it was for them and how they take full responsibility people will ask “hang on, how exactly is this painful for you? how are you taking responsibility, what are you doing about it?”