Edit: In case it wasn’t clear, this is not just about CEOs and “executives”. A director level can sometimes be just “manager of managers”. I’m talking about upper middle management here.
The next version of the equal-pay-for-equal-work fight is going to be pretty interesting, and will probably start to boil over sometime in the next 5-10 years.
More telecommuting is going to be generally unstoppable despite a few fits and starts, but since NYC and SF can't afford to just get completely hollowed out in the space of a few years, they need Kansas City to help out with the rent. And it will work too, since some places are more politically important than others. But it won't work forever.
Which just sounds like a union, anyway. So why not just unionize instead...
Now, I love me a good union - and there’s something to be said about a healthy tension between management and labour in terms of keeping management a bit more honest, just like management and capital - but in smaller orgs, a co-op will probably do the job.
The reasoning is that it reduces traffic and reduces stress.
This existed since 2000 ish. It has expanded since covid. I now only go to the office once every two weeks. Used to be two times a week.
Think about how absurd it is to argue that Zoom is enough to sustain family or intimate relationships over the long haul.
Zoom isn’t enough. Having that walk with a potential client, that colleague or that supplier might well be.
Often quite a bit less than it looks on-paper when you remove the "working lunch" and "client dinner" and "meeting (at the country club)" and "reading emails while lounging on the private jet" bits.
I will ask: why is it your CEO doing this, not your sales team?
And if your CEO is doing only 4 meetings a year, why can’t they do more ?
If you have a billion dollars in revenue per client, how many potential clients can you have ?
Won’t they run out of work in a few years?
At that point what value does the CEO add ? Will they still be going on trips for meetings which will never result in billion dollar revenues ?
I get the spirit of your point. To use it further, to understand it, we should scrutinize even the CEO role.
Assuming im a shareholder, why should we ‘subsidize’ a useless CEO at any point ?
The CEO is also an employee in the end.
I'm sorry but this concept should be immediately clear, if not, you really shouldn't be discussing what a CEO should or shouldn't be doing with his time.
This additional information added narrows the options.
As stated, the CEO is simply a source of prestige, who satisfies the other party’s ego.
None of this, information changes my questions or makes them irrelevant.
If anything, it is clear that the CEO is completely fungible. They are only needed 4 times a year, to satisfy the ego of 4 potential revenue sources.
The core ‘work’ is done by the rest of the firm.
That means, of the 1 bn dollars in revenue that you ascribed to the CEO, they represent a very small part of the actual effort.
What shareholder value do they bring the rest of the year?
In essence - CEO positions are not immune to economic logic. They, like the firm, work for shareholders.
Based on the added data, it would seem that there is reason to take umbrage with CEO privileges - such as their ability to work remotely.
After all, if they are doing nothing the rest of the year, they can be paid less for it.
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For me, communication is at its core, problem solving.
Stating that someone shouldn’t problem solve, while being oblivious to your own thin hypothetical, is perilously close to ignorance and close mindedness.
It is a certainly a form of gatekeeping, and blindness to one’s own biases.
Why not check our assumptions? They are obvious to you, but
1) Will anyone else come up with those same assumptions given a short 1 para of text?
2) How do yours assumption hold up to scrutiny unless they are exposed and discussed?
TLDR: Providing a hypothetical isn’t a full stop in a discussion. It’s the opposite.
Hypothetically, if all a programmer did was, once a quarter, come in in person to maintain some piece of software that created $300k of value per year for the company, is that a problem for you?
Unsolicited career advice: cultivating a reputation and a network within your industry, such that you're the one regularly receiving those calls, can be highly lucrative - look into it
Class asymmetry exists by design.
My team and I are fully remote but our execs are not and are not permitted to be.
When layoffs came around the COO was so out of touch at that point he literally complained about having to fly his family back from Europe.
A few executives were over there when they got word that mass layoffs needed to happen and were called back to HQ in the states. The COO complained in the office that these layoffs ruined his families Europe trip. Confirming what we all suspected.
Since y'all have such brilliant ideas about how to make employees extremely happy and productive, it should be very easy for you to hire talent.
Y'll also have wonderful ideas about collective ownership, just pool together your savings and start a company. You can keep those dirty capitalists away. You have talent flocking to you. You can build anything you want.
Go ahead. Do this.
Edit: As expected massive downvoting from an entitled, progressive group that has infested the greatest country built on capitalism
I come to this conclusion, b/c I think its extremely rare that the 'best' person to be the executive on day0 is rarely the 'best' person to be an executive in every stage of a company's lifecycle. but the executives can cling on, b/c they have low accountability (especially when they are the board).
Is it easy to win the lottery? No. Once you win the lottery, is life easier? Yes.
Have you ever seen any process of filtering job candidates that doesn't have massive failures? Look no further than sports. There is no profession with more accessible information about candidate qualifications, and we still see significant failures, signing people to hundreds of millions of dollars who never produce any value over a replacement player. Does that mean the process is no better than throwing darts at phone book? No. There are still actual skills that are hard to attain, and are decent predictors of performance.
When it comes to CEOs, despite the fact that this process doesn't value YOUR skills very highly doesn't mean it's purely random. It means you've either chosen to ignore this filtering process, you never learned what the process is, or you aren't good enough to stand out within it. But that doesn't mean it's a zero-signal filtration.
Also funny thing, typically people consider the "golden area" of US capitalism on which most of current prosperity is built the 50s and 60s, the ratio between exec pay and average employee pay is orders of magnitude different now. Interestingly, the US has lost most of its engineering and manufacturing abilities in the same time. Not sure if that is an indication of the greatest country in the world.
5 jobs later, its been the same at any company that isn't a startup. Execs have never been in the office, they have "offsite" meetings.