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The Economist - Why is everyone so busy?
The predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?
This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @12:13PM
p.s. I don't know why you reward your obviously mediocre CEOs so much too. Why'd you need to pay them huge sums to sack people and damage the company? If they can find ways to retain employees and turn a profit, then yes they're worth millions since that's much harder to do.
We do not. The shareholders of the companies do. If the shareholders believe paying tens of millions to someone who promotes a short-term profit-at-all-costs mentality is paramount to the company's success, then that's what will happen.
Most (if not all) upper-tier 'C' level executives aren't employees. They work under a personal services contract and are in it just for one reason: maximizing their personal profits (the exact same reason most shareholders invest in a company).
The idea of growing a business as a place where everyone prospers (principals, shareholders, execs, labor, local community, etc) is a nostalgic relic of days gone by. Quick profits are the name of the game. You can even see this when a large multi-billion dollar international conglomerate posts a great quarter but is slightly conservative with their next quarter projections. The stock can go down even though they just posted great profits.
Greed has become the foundation of large economies (just look at the companies that have government contracts or the ones buying politicians). So much so that now employees need to be greedy just to try to earn a living wage (which certainly hasn't kept up with inflation over the last few decades).