Here's an example: When Enron's CEO verbally attacked wall street analyst Richard Grubman for questioning Enron's accounting practices, Enron employees thought this was hilarious and adopted the insult as a sort of inside joke. They didn't consider Richard Grubman's position, they just took delight in 'their team' dunking on 'opposing team.'
The question I keep asking myself is, if not now, then when?
https://www.newsday.com/business/columnists/help-wanted-carr...
Giving all of your employees two weeks unannounced vacation at random times is a disruptive way to run a company. It's certainly innovative but I wouldn't say it's HR "done right".
Yeah. That doesn't work. Forcing the same thing in a scheduled way may be a bit of an imposition but isn't unreasonable in general.
Large companies simply have different risks. If someone quitting randomly is a huge risk for your business you want to know about it ahead of time to mitigate it while they still work for you. 1 random week of vacation every ~3 years shouldn’t be a big deal, and discovering it was is valuable.
I know firefighters often work 72 hour straight shifts. For a similar reason, I know being a firefighter isn’t the right career for me.
I suspect some jobs need to optimize days off for things other than employee happiness. For trading specifically, they can generally make up for it with above average pay.
I wonder what happened after that? Could he continue working as if nothing special, just failing to raise money?
The industry has largely moved away from this structure for a variety of reasons. One of the problems is that traders start to try and undermine each other, since the only thing that matters is your personal pnl. Another problem is that traders can unknowingly all pile into the same investments, resulting in massive risk. This is part of the reason why the Great Recession was so bad.
And even when they end up raking in the bucks, for the shareholders it's nothing compared to what it could have been.
Usually, the upper management teams are extremely lean. The business is broken up into different silos such that few people can see the big picture. Each is led to believe they are a tiny fraction of the overall revenue, giving them the impression that the bulk of the company’s revenue must come from another department where they have no visibility. As a bonus, this motivates siloed teams to feel like they need to catchup to the rest of the company, when in reality they might be the main driver of it. It helps to have separate offices and a culture of secrecy to prevent people from comparing notes.
The CEO positions himself as a controlling, micromanaging individual at the center of everything. This makes it possible for the CEO to intercept financials and other crucial numbers en route to people who might catch on.
The rest of the management staff might be filled with people too inexperienced to recognize that something is wrong. They might think the CEO is doing them a favor by giving them a golden opportunity to advance their career into an executive position at a rocket ship startup. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they think it’s okay because the CEO has taken them under his wing.
At scale it becomes difficult to do this without at least a few people being complicit, though. A fraudster usually has several close associates who can be trusted to be in on the fraud or at least look the other way for a while.