Unsought Input

What do you do When you find out you are wrong?

Not just wrong about one thing, or a little bit wrong. What do you do when you find out you are very wrong, and consistently wrong, and there are really big consequences?

President Bush, after three years, seems to finally realize he has been wrong. Well, not really. But he has finally acknowledged the big consequences part. Part of the problem has been that he has only gotten advice from those willing to tell him what he wants to hear. So the formation of the Iraq Study Group was a good thing, right? Finally, some independent experts would weight in, and tell the President some things he wouldn’t like to hear.

Except they weren’t really experts. And their advice has little to do with Iraq. And Bush isn’t really listening anyway.

So how do we win the war in Iraq? Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t hurt to ask the real experts - the military people actually in Iraq. In fact, one of our troops has given us a PowerPoint presentation. That’s right, it’s even in the preferred format of upper management everywhere. Seriously, go there right now and watch the presentation, it’s only 18 slides.

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People love to bemoan the supposed excess of corporate executives, especially in the wake of the major corporate scandals that have been front page news for the last few years. People say that executives are obese pigs feeding from the corporate trough, reincarnations of decadent Roman emperors gorging themselves on rampant profit, big-bellied Nash caricatures come to life, etc. Well, nobody actually says those things in those words, but that is the general sentiment. All things being equal, executive pay is the product of market forces and it is hard to argue with what the market is wiling to bear. Weak compensation committees on boards of directors may indirectly contribute, but that is the concern of the shareholders who elect board members, not John Q. Public. But all things are not equal and executives can and do use guile and omission to enrich themselves in ways that deceive the very shareholders they are supposed to be ultimately working for. Here is one such deceit.

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Jason wrote an interesting post about whether the denizens of Slashdot were correct in claiming that CEOs are inherenly sociopathic. While it is tempting to label CEOs sociopaths because the nature of their job supposedly rewards lacking empathy and nobody likes the wealthy and powerful, they are not and here is why.
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