CEO pay vs average worker pay

I do not know which WalMart you shop in, but the one that I go to about 10 times per year has lots of friendly and helpful employees who will NEVER work hard enough or study long enough to become a CEO. The reason is that they did not win a genetic lottery that would allow them to climb that hill.

CEOs and corporate execs make far more money than they need and far more money than is readily justifiable on the grounds of fairness/equity. However, it seems that coming up with mechanisms to cure the imbalance here may be worse than the imbalance itself.

 

Your first sentence in no way addressed my point. Would you like to try again?

 

I think he's trying to say that your statement that, "Anyone with a certain baseline intelligence can, through hard work and study, acquire the knowledge and skills to become a CEO," is false.

Now, we can quibble about whether the average Walmart employee has "baseline intelligence", but I still think you're underestimating the skills and smarts required.

Now, maybe you can point to some CEO who is not a super genius. I'm sure you can. But he/she probably makes up for it in other areas. Maybe they're great at hiring good people to work for them. Maybe they have great ideas, and have others who can implement them.

I'm not sure someone like Richard Branson is an operational genius. And, I don't think he spends a lot of his time running his companies on a day to day basis. But, he's a marketing and branding genius. He's been able to license his brand, and be the big idea guy.

I'm not sure you can learn that from hard work.

 

That's not what his first post said. He was comparing Kobe Bryant with a random guy from the Lakers PR department. Then he came back and scraped the bottom of the Walmart barrel. He moved the goalposts on me.

 

It may be "easier", but that doesn't make it easy. Newspapers as a whole were wildly successful around 2000. Doesn't mean it was easy to keep them that way.

It's easier to make a half-court shot than a three-quarters court shot. But that doesn't make the half-court shot easy.

The "average intelligence" person could not have steered the growth Walmart has seen in the past 15 years any more than the "average" person could have coached the Ravens to the Super Bowl championship.

 

Your point was that if somebody wanted to be a CEO, they should start their own company. You then used Mike Duke as an example. Which would be fine, if Mike Duke had started his own company. He didn't.

Or, to put it another way, when Mike Duke became CEO, he started on third base and his team is already up 15-0. A lot different from somebody who starts with nothing and builds it up.

 

WTF?

 

These people with a "certain baseline intelligence" may not have the drive or the capacity to work or the ability to negotiate or make a deal or call someone's bluff . . . because they are not wired that way. "Genetics" is a little more than a big fucking bicep.

 

Which word confused you?

 

He's not doing a great job. Walmart is missing profit goals and same-store sales have been declining for a few years. Just wait as Walmart doubles down on not fixing its logistical problems.