This debate is way off topic, but I think it turns on your definition of "crooked". If you mean deliberately felonious, I don't think most senior management falls in that group, though plenty of exceptions (see Enron). If you mean having a total disregard for everyone but themselves, and with no concern about the consequences of their actions, then it is a much larger pool of people (see everyone involved in the financial crisis). There is a bell curve going from scrupulously honest and trustworthy (let's say Idaho for example), to by the book but willing to take a sucker to the cleaners, to those engaging in self-enriching sharp practices (CEO's with massive golden parachutes despite abject failure), to the truly criminally guilty. What to make of the senior management of Merck, which has been long admired as among the best run US firms, over the foot-dragging and dissembling when it came to Vioxx? A good friend of mine has spent his career in upper mid-level management at Exxon, and he was telling me when they merged with Mobil it was a huge culture clash between the much more by the book Exxon and the more risk taking and corner cutting culture at Mobil (among other things, he used to run one of Exxon's main refineries, and the safety culture was quite different than what the Mobil people were used to).
Bottom line, there is a huge spread, just as in any group of people. I know plenty of shady doctors who are more grifters than healers (kickbacks for referrrals of patients from home health and DME companies are an open secret, often covered up by making you "Director of Bullshit" and paying you a monthly stipend as long as you keep the patients flowing).
When I studied psychiatry and we went over personality disorders, it was emphasized that personality disorders are not actually diseases. Our personalities can be adaptive or not depending on the circumstances. Being a sociopath can be a negative if you are serial killer, but a sociopathic CEO is sufficiently ruthless to fire thousands and not think twice about it if that is what it takes to save the company, while a normal human being can't bring herself to do that. Sociopaths have their uses. |
