Your argument is general hand waving unless you have actual supportive numbers.
No more so than the "CEO's are paid far too much argument. Certainly less so than the idea that "CEO's are paid far too much and the government should do something about it" idea.
I encounter this type of argument again and again on SI lately. If you espouse free market ideas, against some form of government intervention, or for the idea that the market may have gotten it reasonably right when many think it has not, you are supposed to provide all sorts of detail and exact numbers.
But there is never any real supporting detail or precise and relevant numbers from the other side. ("and relevant" is very important, I don't expect you to do this, but many other people on SI trying to argue your point would list a bunch of high CEO salaries and say its XXX times what a teacher makes, so obviously its wrong and something must be done, as if the mere listing of the high salary number of the difference between it and a teachers pay made their argument.
Duh, that is exactly what Jobs did after leaving Apple. He started Next, and Next was going to take over the world from Apple in the long run! So, how did that go? Oops, it went broke.
Its not such a bad example. The fact that Jobs actually did start Next, shows that he felt he could run a new company and that other people felt he could as well. Even the failure of NEXT was unlikely to change that. If he didn't return to Apple he likely would have been able to raise funding for some other type of new company, or perhaps taken over an existing company as CEO getting a very big stake in the bargain pretty much becoming its primary owner.
And he may well have succeed. Tech startups (or small companies with big ideas that aren't necessarily brand new so technically wouldn't be start ups) where (and are) very risky, and Jobs would hardly have been the only person to fail before succeeding.
I do think she oversells her theory, I think its more about the fact that a good CEO can make enough difference for a large company to make even their large salary be fairly unimportant, is the bigger factor than her idea.
But at times when venture capital is flowing, and booms like the tech boom (and not just the "internet boom part of it", but all the tech funding and stock booms in tech companies before the "internet boom" as well) it becomes an important factor.
Right now that might not be the case to the same extent. I haven't closely watched venture capital, but I would guess that its hardly booming, certainly the stock markets are not.
OTOH general pay scales trends don't just immediately disintegrate as soon as hard times hit. |
