Today on the 5: You may have seen news about layoffs at Bungie and the excessive spending of the CEO Pete Parsons right before these staffing reductions. Sites like Aftermath and critics such as Stephanie Sterling have tried to say this makes Parsons a bad CEO, but I would argue the opposite.
Ozone Nightmare
The Moral Black Hole
And specifically, the generation of wealth for the shareholders or, in the case of Bungie, the parent company who also answered the shareholders. That's where the morality is. Everything else is not a consideration. The health and wellness of the employees, who cares? Is it getting in the way of profits or is it generating loss? Then it's a problem. And P. Parsons is doing his job by laying these people off. He is in fact operating in the best interest of not only Bungie as a company, but the parent company to make sure that they seem financially whole. I love that term financially whole. It is both benign and utterly disgusting at the same time. Where is George Carlin? I wish you were still here for this crap because I can only imagine what he would be saying. But that is ultimately what Parsons is responsible for. Not to keep employees on the payroll, not to have any type of obligation to look at these people and understand that there is something that is morally bankrupt about buying cars, many of which will probably never be driven to sit in a garage or be gawked at by people who are envious of his wealth, but to instead focus on the employees and try to salvage as many jobs as possible. No, that is not the correct action in this case. That is something that a moral person would think of. People who are at a moral level that don't have so much wealth and responsibilities that demand that they keep being subservient to that wealth. They will look at others in pain and if they have extra, they will at least consider if not actually take action to help someone else. But people in these positions, they are trained and in fact rewarded not to. What their first priority must always be is the wealth and the future profit generation of the company and everything else. Any other considerations are at the very least, not considerations or if they impact that profit generation are negatives. That's what gets somebody let go as a CEO. I mean outside of monstrous acts like child predation and things like that. But if you act against the fiduciary interest of the company that you work for, that is the fireable offense. Laying people off, whether rightly or wrongly, whether justified, whether some of them were about to start maternity leave, no, that doesn't matter. That's not something you can figure into a column on a spreadsheet or at least nobody ever has as far as I know it at the company level when you get to that size. No, what matters is are the dollars going to keep rolling in. That's the calculus that actually means something and so long as you are making that calculus and as long as you are at least working towards making that calculus a positive one, then you are doing your job. So should P Parsons be let go of as a CEO because he spent a bunch of money on cars and laid people off? No, P Parsons is doing his job and he'll keep me rewarded for it as long as he does it the correct way that he knows how later.