The Hall of Shame

One of the major problems leading to our present financial crisis is corporate greed – pure and simple. One course of action that might help to solve this problem is to prepare and widely publicize an annual Hall of Shame, showing the net income (salaries and bonuses minus donations to tax deductible charities) of the 500 top paid executives of the world. Those eligible for review would work in publicly traded companies, public institutions, and private institutions willing to make this type of financial data available. This information would be listed with the average net income of the employees who work for these organizations. In this manner, objective comparisons would be available for review by the general public and permit them to make selective consumer choices based on this analysis.

In that they create something new, which results in the formation of new jobs, entrepreneurs would not be subjected to this type of analysis.  The only ones to be so examined would be those who do not provide anything original but only work to keep something going that someone else started.

These Fat Cats and Porky Pigs should go the way of the Dodo – the sooner, the better – with the excess distributed more evenly among the company’s employees.

I am a fledgling designer of franchise networks and this is a problem to which I have given a lot of attention recently. My solution is to tabulate the results from all franchisees for profits, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction; rank each with respect to the average for these performance parameters; and then require the high performers to provide advice and consultation to the low performers. Those high ranking franchisee employees who were the most successful in helping the low ranking performers to improve would be paid the highest salaries and bonuses in the network.  The highest paid executives in the franchisor could not exceed 90% of the average net income of the top 10% franchisee salaries.

Another unique feature of this design is that termination decisions would not be made by executives but by majority vote of the average performers in the franchisee. Thus, the person in the middle would control the future fate of those with persistent below average performance. In that these people are close to finding themselves being so analyzed in the future, they might be more willing to give the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, in that continued below average performance might result in bankruptcy and unemployment for all, the people in the middle could be expected to be fair and balanced in their decisions.

In that John is my middle name; I am calling the company which highlights this person in the middle, The John Foundation.

Information on the franchise networks for which TJF will be designing this type of automatic control system can be found at www.lowearthorbitnow.org.

Coincidentally, TJF will also take it upon itself to search out candidates for the Hall of Shame as outlined above.