Can we just get on with it now? ;-)
This is why only a few people are capable of running companies. The reality of profit and loss - aka “math” - is too much for most people.
If it was just math, a lot more people would be better at it. But your own statement shows how there’s much more to it than math: “Pay them and hurt the company, or don’t pay but maybe lose your best employees.”
No math is going to tell you how to decide that situation. And business is full of such decisions, which collectively can make or break a company.
If the company is failing, then leadership should be cutting their losses and engaging in deep layoffs. Downsize production to adjust for lower demand, preserve working capital, focus on efficiency. Upsetting your employees is the worst of both worlds: your employees perform worse, and you don't save any money on compensation while that happens. So you make a deep cut, take the emotional hit, make it clear that it's the only cut you're going to make, and then ramp the company back up.
That said, it's far from the most egregious thing I've heard, I'm not going to spend many cycles thinking about it. But I can understand why the employees would be upset by it.
People setting up home offices has been a hugely growing market that apparently has gone uncaptured by MillerKnoll. I wonder who sets the strategy for a company that we could blame for this failing? Whomever they are, they probably shouldn't get a bonus as that would be rewarding failure.
Uh, not really. The only one emotions we are talking about here are the CEO's, and how they are impacting communication with employees.
> The reality is the company is failing, can’t pay people what you don’t have.
There are good ways to communicate this reality to your employees. If you think what the CEO did is a good way, then I wish you good luck.
How does that math make sense at all?
CEO's get paid when the companies do well and they get paid when they do poorly. They get paid if it completely falls apart. How does that help companies perform better? How does that profit and loss math work here?
Americans...
In civilized parts of the world you cannot fire anyone except for in specific circumstances.
There's always another option: restructuring (the organization, compensation structures, product portfolios and market positioning...), getting in the trenches (understanding that performance fundamentally depends on emotional state)... The "math" tells you where you are, and it can illustrate that you sometimes work within real limitations, but it doesn't define how you should react.
Who are you claiming here is capable of running a company because the reality of profit and loss isn't too much? The person receiving over $3m in bonuses despite the her company "needs to make money and apparently isn't"? It sure seems to me like she's one of those people who "still want bonuses".
What I have encountered, and this is partly because I did a stint in management (and the necessary education that you’ll typically be required to get in Denmark if you’re promoted into management) before I went back to being a programmer as I hated managing people, was that management lives in a different world than employees as well as being an employee themselves. I think this is a video of someone who forgot that there are two worlds, and also someone who maybe forgot (or never learned) about motivational theory, and well, how to communicate with dignity and respect, but at the end of the day, an organisation has goals and CEOs and managers are responsible for reaching those goals with the resources they are given. One or the first things you’ll learn in MBA type studies is that everyone is expendable, it’s only a question of how much it’ll cost to lose them. You can see this as a negative thing, but it can mean a lot of things. In programming it tells a manager to encourage their employees to build code in a manner that’s not too dependent on its authors. We do this by employing various principles for coding standard and documentation because if we don’t, it gets really expensive when someone quits. I personally think it’s a good thing to learn as an employee as well, because it’s healthy to keep a distance from your job and your personality, so that you can better be an employee and also a person and not have that melt too much together so that it gets soul crushing for you when you get fired. Which you probably will, and often not for any reasons you could help.
That being said. I get that this “pity city” was an eureka moment for her, but how hilarious is it that she didn’t consider how it sounded to non managers?
I’ve never met a CEO or any sort of manager they match your description.
A few were assholes, more (managers) were incompetent but none of them were
backstabbers, liars or cheats, because you genuinely can’t lead people if you
are.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/10-ceos-who-went-bo...
CEOs are also extremely charismatic. When a random doofus nerd runs across one in person, they charm the hell out of the nerd and seem like the coolest, nicest person said nerd has ever met. Same goes for politicians. The fact that you're friends with a couple of CEOs basically means nothing at all.
What are you even hoping to achieve with that post? Your experiences may be very different from mine, and that is just fine, but there is no reason to be rude about it.
Your post is basically saying "Hey, all those times in your life that a company screwed you over were actually good, and you were wrong to be unhappy about it", and I wanted to debunk that for you and anyone else who reads what you posted
This is specifically why I mentioned the American corporate system. The cultures are very different. For an example that you might specifically identify, most American corporate managers would consider anything approaching Janteloven extremely woke and socialist.
This is to be expected. Typical power structures, especially those in corporate America favor the promotion of liars, backstabbers, cheats, and controlling people to leadership positions at a far higher rate than calm, friendly, nice ones.
This goes doubly so now that workers have a bit more power -- remember that outside tech, the job market is still pretty tight for employers, similar to 2021. Honestly, following Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, anyone who is capable of getting themselves into a leadership position should on no account be allowed to do the job.
If you want to change this, there are few options -- but a good one is to stop rewarding these assholes with your money. I am going to avoid Herman Miller as much as I can in the future for personal or professional furniture.