Tag: CEO

The End of the Corporate CEO!

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Capitalism

CEO’s will soon be gone. And when they are, it will be much better world and a much better economy.

When these preening fools with their enormous salaries, portfolio of stocks and out sized political power disappear, no one will lament and no one will care.

And right now they are firing people and replacing them with AI. They are so happy about it, talking about more profits and not having to deal with ungrateful and troublesome workers. You might think that they are acting like unfeeling and inhuman machines. And you would be right.

Over and over again, you see in the business press the worship of the cutthroat CEO putting the hammer down on the workers. You get the impression that they want a man who is completely free of the normal limitations on greed and wrong doing. They don’t look for Christians. They don’t look for human qualities like love, kindness and understanding. And above all a reverence for nation or an obedience to the law is a red line to be avoided.

So, what do stockholders and boards of directors want? They want a man shorn of human emotion.

However, they are often bitterly disappointed. Even the cold blooded specimens of humanity they can find sometimes slip. It is deeply regrettable. He might develop a love for a child. He might wander accidentally into a church. There is no telling what traps of morality, religion or family can do to even the best cold blooded psychopath.

At the moment, they are happily firing and destroying the human beings that get in the way of their vision. Don’t believe me??

How about this little story:

https://fortune.com/2025/08/17/ceo-laid-off-80-percent-workforce-ai-sabotage/

Eric Vaughan, CEO of enterprise-software powerhouse IgniteTech, is unwavering as he reflects on the most radical decision of his decades-long career. In early 2023, convinced that generative AI was an “existential” transformation, Vaughan looked at his team and saw a workforce not fully on board. His ultimate response: He ripped the company down to the studs, replacing nearly 80% of staffwithin a year, according to headcount figures reviewed by Fortune.

Over the course of 2023 and into the first quarter of 2024, Vaughan said IgniteTech replaced hundreds of employees, declining to disclose a specific number. “That was not our goal,” he told Fortune. “It was extremely difficult … But changing minds was harder than adding skills.” It was, by any measure, a brutal reckoning—but Vaughan insists it was necessary, and says he’d do it again.

He got rid of eighty percent! Now, that is cold blooded! And he is so proud telling the press the he’d do it again and talking about his former employees as if they were some kind of disobedient pets! What a guy! The ideal CEO! Got a conscience, hell no, screw that! Ice water for blood.

Now of course, there has to be a down side. Carping critics like me. I, a pitiful liberal, with my weird and out of date beliefs in the sanctity of the law, Christian obligations devised and stated clearly by Jesus Christ and a devotion to the ideals of the United States. Those beliefs lead me to believe that this CEO is doomed to Hell where many others like him dwell.

But as these CEO’s fire and proclaim their delight in cruelty, they don’t realize the bitter irony.

Let me tell you a story. There was once an episode of the Twilight Zone called “The Brain Center at Whipple’s.”

Let me Quote that master of television writing, Rod Serling’s intro:

These are the players — with or without a scorecard. In one corner a machine; in the other, one Wallace V. Whipple, man. And the game? It happens to be the historical battle between flesh and steel, between the brain of man and the product of man’s brain. We don’t make book on this one and predict no winner….but we can tell you for this particular contest, there is standing room only — in the Twilight Zone.

This passage is from my dear friends at Wikipeda, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27s

In the story, a company manager replaces all the workers with machines and then is replaced by a machine himself. and this fictional and cautionary event is about to happen in real life.

(Film screen-shot of 1956 film Forbidden Planet. Intended to support film’s plot description. I include this picture because in the Twighlight episode discussed above, our friend robbie here was the one who replaced the boss – but he was uncredited, the fate of the robot.)

In an article written by Emma Burleigh in Fortune, Google X’s former chief business officer Mo Gawdat is quoted in the following article.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ai-gutting-workforces-ex-google-150148959.html

But executives shouldn’t celebrate their efficiency gains too soon—their role is also on the chopping block, Gawdat, who worked in tech for 30 years and now writes books on AI development, cautioned.

“CEOs are celebrating that they can now get rid of people and have productivity gains and cost reductions because AI can do that job. The one thing they don’t think of is AI will replace them too,” Gawdat continued. “AGI is going to be better at everything than humans, including being a CEO. You really have to imagine that there will be a time where most incompetent CEOs will be replaced.”

“Better at everything than humans, including being a CEO.” I love the irony and have a certain sense that this is finally real justice at these self-proclaimed masters of the economy.

But you say, “Stop James, that is merely one voice among many. I’m sure it is not true.”

Don’t be quite so sure, I have some other sources.

How about this one:

From by Hamza Mudassir, Kamal Munir, Shaz Ansari and Amal Zahra writing in the Harvard Business Review.

https://hbr.org/2024/09/ai-can-mostly-outperform-human-ceos

Or this article written byFrank Landymore for The Byte:

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ceos-easily-replaced-with-ai

CEOs better start endearing themselves to their employees real quick, because oh boy: the case for replacing them with AI just keeps mounting.

And then there is this article from Forbes –

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sherzododilov/2024/01/11/can-ai-become-your-next-ceo/

And this article from Inc – EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO.

Let me add here just above the link that this is a very delightfully written article. You should read the whole thing. This guy is just a great writer. jp

https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/it-wont-be-long-before-ai-replaces-the-ceos/91194705

Corporate and unicorn CEOs have never had a stellar reputation. These aren’t men and women of the people by nature. But over the last 10 or so years, the CEO role has been further marred by alleged thieves (FTX), alleged liars (Theranos), and alleged cults of personality (WeWork), among many, many more problematic abuses of the position. 

So, in my opinion, the days of the CEO are numbered. It probably should have happened a long time ago.

James Alan Pilant

Control Fraud And William K. Black

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

 This is fascinating. Essentially William K. Black is modifying out concepts of White Collar Crime (The Lord knows it needs it!).

Here Black explains what he means by the concept –

Here’s a fuller treatment by the author.

When Fragile becomes Friable: Endemic Control Fraud as a Cause of Economic Stagnation and Collapse

Individual “control frauds” cause greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined. They are financial super-predators. Control frauds are crimes led by the head of state or CEO that use the nation or company as a fraud vehicle. Waves of “control fraud” can cause economic collapses, damage and discredit key institutions vital to good political governance, and erode trust. The defining element of fraud is deceit – the criminal creates and then betrays trust. Fraud, therefore, is the strongest acid to eat away at trust. Endemic control fraud causes institutions and trust to become friable – to crumble – and produce economic stagnation.

Read More!

Job Cutting CEO’s Average 12 Million In Salary (not counting other benefits)

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure

The fifty largest job cutting companies in the United States paid their chief executive officers a total of 598 million dollars.

Read some more –

The nation’s biggest job-cutting companies paid their top executives an average of $12 million last year, according to a report released today.

The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.

In “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month’s worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.

The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the report said.

“These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels,” the authors wrote.

The complete article is here.

The complete study is found here.

Job killing has been profitable for many years now but the scale of the rewards are almost unimaginable. Reflect that 12 million dollars yearly is a million a month. In a thirty day month, that’s about 33,000 dollars a day or 4,166 dollars and hour or 69.44 a minute.

James Pilant