Schadenfreude

It‘s been said that Dubya is our first CEO president – and sadly, that’s probably true. Like many of our CEOs, Georgie has failed up a lot in life. In January, Robert Nardelli was forced out as CEO of Home Depot as a failure and he still landed a $210 Million dollar severance package. That’s over $550,000 per day for a year, folks.

Nardelli isn’t alone. In 2006, Henry McKinnell was kicked out of Pfiser with a severance package of more than $200 million. Bruce Karatz gets fired from KB Home in a stock options scandal and still walks away with $175 million. Morgan Stanley gives Philip Purcell the boot and he leaves with $113 million.

Of course, it’s the boards of these companies that are allowing all of this to happen. Why do they do it? It's really very simple – self interest. Many CEOs are directors for other companies and so they hope to get a similarly generous handout when it’s their time to cash out (or be thrown out, as the case often is).

Now some will argue that these packages (and the obscene salaries that accompany them) only reflect what the market will bear and their contribution to the success of the company. But how can someone who was essentially fired for lack of performance have contributed in any meaningful way to the success of the company? For that matter, how can a single person (who doesn’t actually produce anything) have contributed that much at all, even if they hadn’t been incompetent? If you want to reward people for their contribution to the success of the company, reward the people who actually do the real work and don’t reward the guys who screw up. If these CEOs worked for the bush administration, there’d be a medal of freedom in it for each of them.