Post by Bozur on Jan 15, 2008 13:45:50 GMT -5
I’m Asking Nicely: Please Show Me the Door
By JOHN SCHWARTZ / Published: January 13, 2008
REMEMBER when getting fired was a bad thing?
Daniel Vasconcellos
That’s old thinking. These days, getting the boot means it’s time to break out the bubbly, baby!
Here at the Mutual Funds Quarterly Humor Column (Our motto, borrowed from Elvis Costello: “I used to be disgusted/Now I try to be amused”), we’ve been marveling at the good fortune of corporate executives who have departed in the wake of the subprime mortgage mess.
Consider two chief executives who have resigned: E. Stanley O’Neal and Charles O. Prince III. Mr. O’Neal lost his job at Merrill Lynch on Oct. 30, six days after the firm announced a record $8.4 billion in quarterly write-downs tied to subprime-mortgage-related securities and bad loans. Mr. Prince was shown the door at Citigroup, which also took a beating and has lost $64 billion in market value over the last four years.
Mr. O’Neal walks away with a severance package worth about $161 million. Mr. Prince gets some $68 million, with a cash bonus of at least $12.5 million, an office, a car and a driver for the next five years.
Here’s the best part: Mr. Prince’s bonus is not based on the company’s lousy performance in 2007, as my colleague Eric Dash recently pointed out, but on the company’s much better performance in 2006. Citi has invented a time machine!
The joke, of course, is on us, the people who lost money in financial-sector stocks, who will have a harder time getting mortgages, who will be dealing with companies that can’t get credit.
You lost your home; they get a fancier yacht for sailing to Elba.
Graef Crystal, the Bloomberg News financial columnist, suggested recently that Mr. Prince was actually suffering, because he was getting no cash severance and was walking away with far less money than, say, his predecessor, Sanford I. Weill. And Mr. O’Neal will get no severance pay — just his lucrative stock options, free shares, deferred compensation and all the other goodies.
I know I’ve got that tiny violin somewhere. . .
As a matter of fact, Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate at the Corporate Library, an independent research firm specializing in corporate governance, says that there could be still more lucrative departures in the subprime fiasco. In a recent report, he looked at the chief-executive severance packages and benefits that companies with exposure to subprime troubles disclose, and the average is about 66 million. Dollars.
On the phone, Mr. Hodgson said that the rich, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, fail differently than you and I. “The big mistake we made was not bringing a lawyer in to the interview with us when we got our jobs,” he said.
I recall the first time I was fired. It was a shock to be told that I was not up to the standards of a singing-telegram company. My pay had not yet covered the cost of the uniform. (I don’t want to talk about what it looked like.) My last gig was a publicity stunt for a publicity stunt: I was told to deliver a song-and-dance greeting to the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales on their visit to Austin, Tex. My boss found my performance disappointing. I was, apparently, not sufficiently professional. And I was gone.
As I recall, I was not offered several million dollars.
Unfortunately, many of us have had such moments. I called Erin Belieu, a poet. She’s the author of a poem that I love: “On Being Fired Again,” which describes some of the 11 dismissals in her desultory work life on the way to becoming an associate professor of English at Florida State University. In it, she described feeling unmotivated — “squirting perfume onto little cards,/while stocking salad bars, when stripping/covers from romance novels, their heroines/slaving on the chain gang of obsessive love.”
In other words, they were not great jobs. Still, she wrote, losing them brought “the same hard candy/of shame dissolving in my throat.”
On the phone, she said that being fired, even from lousy jobs, was hard and humiliating, and that she felt “the idea of being fired is terrible — you should be deeply ashamed.”
Instead of the hard candy of shame, though, some folks seem to be enjoying bonbons that melt on the tongue. She wondered what it must be like to be, as she put it, “freakishly rich.” She asked, “Do you buy a $10,000 sweater?”
It pained me to tell her that the former Tyco chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski had a $6,000 shower curtain. This news just about sent the poet into orbit.
“It must be made out of babies or something,” she huffed. “I’ll have to work that into a poem sometime.”
All of this led her to ask of the lavishly compensated, out-of-work Wall Street chieftains: “Were they embarrassed?”
Short answer? No!
Clearly, we’re all looking at it the wrong way. These chief executives are brilliant people, captains of industry and obviously striding manfully ahead of the game.
Maybe they’re on to something.
Maybe we shouldn’t be so worried about the unemployment rate.
Maybe, just maybe, the real problem is that too many of us are employed, when we could be failing lucratively. Instead of trying to bolster employment, we should encourage more departures and let a thousand golden parachutes bloom.
It’s bold, but I’m nothing if not bold. In fact, it’s stupid, and I’m nothing if not stupid. But sometimes bold and stupid works. This could be one of those times.
No need to thank me. Just fire me. My terms are reasonable.
www.nytimes.com/
By JOHN SCHWARTZ / Published: January 13, 2008
REMEMBER when getting fired was a bad thing?
Daniel Vasconcellos
That’s old thinking. These days, getting the boot means it’s time to break out the bubbly, baby!
Here at the Mutual Funds Quarterly Humor Column (Our motto, borrowed from Elvis Costello: “I used to be disgusted/Now I try to be amused”), we’ve been marveling at the good fortune of corporate executives who have departed in the wake of the subprime mortgage mess.
Consider two chief executives who have resigned: E. Stanley O’Neal and Charles O. Prince III. Mr. O’Neal lost his job at Merrill Lynch on Oct. 30, six days after the firm announced a record $8.4 billion in quarterly write-downs tied to subprime-mortgage-related securities and bad loans. Mr. Prince was shown the door at Citigroup, which also took a beating and has lost $64 billion in market value over the last four years.
Mr. O’Neal walks away with a severance package worth about $161 million. Mr. Prince gets some $68 million, with a cash bonus of at least $12.5 million, an office, a car and a driver for the next five years.
Here’s the best part: Mr. Prince’s bonus is not based on the company’s lousy performance in 2007, as my colleague Eric Dash recently pointed out, but on the company’s much better performance in 2006. Citi has invented a time machine!
The joke, of course, is on us, the people who lost money in financial-sector stocks, who will have a harder time getting mortgages, who will be dealing with companies that can’t get credit.
You lost your home; they get a fancier yacht for sailing to Elba.
Graef Crystal, the Bloomberg News financial columnist, suggested recently that Mr. Prince was actually suffering, because he was getting no cash severance and was walking away with far less money than, say, his predecessor, Sanford I. Weill. And Mr. O’Neal will get no severance pay — just his lucrative stock options, free shares, deferred compensation and all the other goodies.
I know I’ve got that tiny violin somewhere. . .
As a matter of fact, Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate at the Corporate Library, an independent research firm specializing in corporate governance, says that there could be still more lucrative departures in the subprime fiasco. In a recent report, he looked at the chief-executive severance packages and benefits that companies with exposure to subprime troubles disclose, and the average is about 66 million. Dollars.
On the phone, Mr. Hodgson said that the rich, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, fail differently than you and I. “The big mistake we made was not bringing a lawyer in to the interview with us when we got our jobs,” he said.
I recall the first time I was fired. It was a shock to be told that I was not up to the standards of a singing-telegram company. My pay had not yet covered the cost of the uniform. (I don’t want to talk about what it looked like.) My last gig was a publicity stunt for a publicity stunt: I was told to deliver a song-and-dance greeting to the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales on their visit to Austin, Tex. My boss found my performance disappointing. I was, apparently, not sufficiently professional. And I was gone.
As I recall, I was not offered several million dollars.
Unfortunately, many of us have had such moments. I called Erin Belieu, a poet. She’s the author of a poem that I love: “On Being Fired Again,” which describes some of the 11 dismissals in her desultory work life on the way to becoming an associate professor of English at Florida State University. In it, she described feeling unmotivated — “squirting perfume onto little cards,/while stocking salad bars, when stripping/covers from romance novels, their heroines/slaving on the chain gang of obsessive love.”
In other words, they were not great jobs. Still, she wrote, losing them brought “the same hard candy/of shame dissolving in my throat.”
On the phone, she said that being fired, even from lousy jobs, was hard and humiliating, and that she felt “the idea of being fired is terrible — you should be deeply ashamed.”
Instead of the hard candy of shame, though, some folks seem to be enjoying bonbons that melt on the tongue. She wondered what it must be like to be, as she put it, “freakishly rich.” She asked, “Do you buy a $10,000 sweater?”
It pained me to tell her that the former Tyco chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski had a $6,000 shower curtain. This news just about sent the poet into orbit.
“It must be made out of babies or something,” she huffed. “I’ll have to work that into a poem sometime.”
All of this led her to ask of the lavishly compensated, out-of-work Wall Street chieftains: “Were they embarrassed?”
Short answer? No!
Clearly, we’re all looking at it the wrong way. These chief executives are brilliant people, captains of industry and obviously striding manfully ahead of the game.
Maybe they’re on to something.
Maybe we shouldn’t be so worried about the unemployment rate.
Maybe, just maybe, the real problem is that too many of us are employed, when we could be failing lucratively. Instead of trying to bolster employment, we should encourage more departures and let a thousand golden parachutes bloom.
It’s bold, but I’m nothing if not bold. In fact, it’s stupid, and I’m nothing if not stupid. But sometimes bold and stupid works. This could be one of those times.
No need to thank me. Just fire me. My terms are reasonable.
www.nytimes.com/