It's
difficult to pick the most unproductive corporate leader from the list above,
but perhaps that is not the point.
From this list of the unlucky 13 (out of 20 on CNBC's rogues gallery),
only one Bernie Ebbers was ever punished with jail time (though Ken Lay was
headed there before he died in 2006).
Jay Gould, perhaps the winner of the most Vicious CEO of all time award, and a contemporary of Henry George, was never punished at all, and was estimated to have personally, 1/185th of the nation's GDP at that time he died (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0702/gallery.richestamericans.fortune/9.html). Things have not gotten any better; in 2006, Bill Gates' personal fortune was estimated at 1/152nd of GDP that year (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0702/gallery.richestamericans.fortune/5.html). Quite apart from whether these men have contributed so much to society as to be personally worth a significant portion of the nation's wealth, compared to hundreds of millions of other workers, is the question of what might have been done with some of that money, if returned to the community. Of course some of them may say they gave enormously to charity, and that is true, but perhaps Americans would like to be under a system that is not so paternal, as well as one that is not so economically skewed. Can we not provide for ourselves, if given the chance? Also, these men have suppressed competition in their own far-reaching industries, thereby depriving us of who-knows-how-many new inventions or ways of doing things, so that is a negative to be subtracted from their production.
Finally, many of the corrupt business leaders, even when they were finally booted out, made off with tens, or even hundreds, of millions of dollars, while thousands of workers lost productive livelihoods and quite often, their life savings. In the most recent meltdown, finally triggered, according to many economists, by the $613 Billion (in debts) collapse of Lehman Brothers, CNBC's #1 worst CEO of all time, Dick Fuld, went both unrepentant and unpunished - and with nearly $72 million in total compensation. When Bob Nardelli was fired from Home Depot by an angry board of Directors, he received $210 million in severance (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16451112/). Full Disclosure: when I was laid off (not fired) from my job as Manager of Information Systems when my department was phased out after 22 years, I received a severance package as well. It was somewhat less than $210 million.
Lesson Learned: If you're going to fail, fail spectacularly, and fail quickly.
If one looks over the list, one can't help but be struck by the number of wealth destroyers who made their fortunes in large part through speculation in the "Land' markets (by Land, I, of course, mean George's definition to include all of Earth's Natural Resources). Only John Sculley and Roger Smith could properly be said to have failed without the help of stock or resource market implosions. It's a bit understating things to merely say the other 11 candidates for the Golden Unpro would have done things differently if we had a true, Georgist, Land Value Tax and something equivalent for the Stock market (I am willing to admit the possibility that just a LVT may still be enough, even in this post-George, shadow-banking era) most likely there would have been different CEOs altogether for those companies, pursuing different ways of doing business. Workers at Hewlett-Packard and General Motors might not have been laid off by the thousands; Worldcom and Enron would have remained boring, but stable, utility companies providing a real service. Is it impossible to imagine a railroad company being made without the ruthlessness and gargantuan self-enrichment of Jay Gould, and instead paying the community for the land it used? Henry George, of course, did imagine just that.
CNN founder and billionaire Ted Turner once said that billionaires competed against each other to see who would be the top billionaire. Well, is it so hard to imagine such titans could not be just as happy competing against one another to be merely the top millionaire, if millionaires were all that existed? Would society be lessened? Would output per CEO be reduced? Is it credible to say that Bill Gates, currently estimated to be the world's richest person, actually sat in his college dorm room in his younger days, contemplating dropping out of college to found Microsoft and asked himself, "Gee, I'd like to start a software company, but I really can't see the point unless I make at least $20 billion at it?" Or, did he just see an opportunity to do something game-changing and challenging, with, perhaps, some lucrative, but unspecified, reward down the road?
In fact, we now have ample empirical studies and social proof that excessive pay does NOT lead to superior performance, and may even lead to the opposite, by focusing executives labor on short-term, unproductive, activities. A summary of these findings (http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/CEOsOverpaid.htm) tells us:
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