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Personal Responsibility

Entry 1516, on 2013-04-04 at 19:45:18 (Rating 5, News)

It often seems to me that the people who should accept the greatest responsibility and have the greatest accountability are those who actually accept the least. The people at the top of most hierarchies seem to be very good at accepting all the accolades when their organisation is successful but are far less visible and suddenly seem to have a lot less influence when things go wrong.

And when things are going well these same people happily accept huge bonuses even when the success has little to do with them, but I don't see a lot of them insisting on lesser rewards when things go badly.

In my main job I am paid a salary so I don't get bonuses for the good stuff or penalties when things don't go so well (and they do occasionally) but I also do after hours consulting where I can basically set my own charges. I work in IT, so of course things do intermittently go wrong! Sometimes it's my fault and sometimes it isn't, but generally when I am fixing a problem I don't charge the client extra for doing that (unless it was very clearly the client's fault).

If that sort of system is good enough for me (and my income is fairly moderate, despite doing the extra work) why is it not good enough for people whose normal rate of pay is vastly greater than mine? Why don't they fix their own errors at no charge?

If you live in New Zealand or know anything about current events here you might have guessed by now who I have in mind here. I'm talking about our old friend Don Elder, former CEO of Solid Energy. This highly paid business leader took a well performing state-owned company and completely destroyed it. Before the degree of his incompetence became widely known he resigned, but being one of the new elite with a huge sense of his own perceived value and self-importance he continued to accept his grossly inflated salary for "helping" the company out of its precarious financial position.

Any decent human being at this stage would have either said "no sorry, I've messed this up, I will leave but don't give me any more payments for a job I'm clearly incapable of doing" or said "yes, I will help fix the problems I created but I insist you don't pay me to fix something which shouldn't have gone wrong in the first place". It seems to be that being paid over a million dollars a year to destroy a company and then charging the same rate to try to fix it is a bit self-serving.

As I said above, I would never contemplate charging a client to fix a problem which I was responsible for in the first place. And if people are paid based on how responsible their job is you would expect someone with over ten times my salary to demonstrate ten times the degree of personal liability when things go wrong. But in the case of the corporate aristocracy apparently that isn't the case. The extent of their feeling of personal entitlement is unbelievable!

But I shouldn't just pick on poor old Don Elder, should I? What about all the other numerous examples of gross incompetence from the top echelons of management in New Zealand? What about the evil Dame Jenny Shipley's hideous ineptitude in helping drive Mainzeal Construction into bankruptcy? Doesn't she deserve some of the blame? Well she was being paid a lot of money while she was on the board. Again, does she accept the attendant responsibility or not? Well I think we all know the answer to that!

And do you want a further list of the new incompetent elite? How about these prominent people who have also presided over similar disasters (this list is from the New Zealand Herald): Wyatt Creech and John Luxton at Blue Chip; Sir Roger Douglas, Fran Wilde and Philip Burdon at Brierley Investments; Don Brash and John Banks at Huljich Wealth Management; Sir Douglas Graham and Bill Jeffries at Lombard; Sir William Birch at Viking Pacific; and Ruth Richardson at Dairy Brands and Syft Technologies.

Did you notice all the "Sirs" and "Dames" in this blog post? These really are the new aristocracy and their value to society is about equivalent to aristocracies everywhere: zero. But they are extremely skilled at acquiring undeserved honours like those. If the job losses and destruction of our economy wasn't so serious the whole situation would be quite humorous. Sort of like a circus with these people the clowns!

It's easy to rant about these people in a blog like this but surely it's much harder to actually do what they're doing, isn't it? Actually, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. It seems to me that in most cases the failures were due to overly ambitious and poorly considered plans for expansion and forgetting about doing the job the company was supposed to be there to do. And it is all about the top management just walking away and moving on to the next unfortunate victim for their allegedly exceptional skills.

Everyone makes mistakes but these people are paid a lot not to make the same mistakes over and over again. And if they do make a mistake at least they could take a little bit of responsibility and do the right thing. But the "right thing" is about as far from the minds of senior management as anything can be. These people are the worst type of immoral, greedy, ignorant excuses for human beings on the face of the planet.

Even if they did work for free they would still be overpaid!

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