I have read many books in preparation for my upcoming adventures as a 40 year old MBA.  What I find interesting with many of these is two-fold; first the number of companies that have been ruined by the greed of those at the top, second the inability of management to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Greed has created goods and services and ruined companies along the way.  What I find interesting is that many large publicly held corporations tolerate some of the extravagances without a bat of the eye.  Some of the pay packages and perks are beyond outrageous.  From a management point of view the perks are reversed.  Those at the top should have less perks than those at the bottom.  Example:  I worked for the Hyatt Regency as a night audit manager, the position was salaried without overtime; my staff made more than I when you add their overtime and benefits.  Staff had uniforms that were paid and laundered by the hotel; lower end management had to dress in business attire and pay for their own dry cleaning.  By simply allowing a modest perk to cover dry-cleaning would have made the loss of overtime more bearable. 

If you read some of the required books you will see a litany of perks such as personal use of corporate jets, personal limos and drivers, paid apartments; and I can appreciate the need for many of these items, but a corporate apartment for one person?  A limo and driver for one?  Can an apartment not be shared by multiple executives, a car and driver for multiple groups?  Are accesses to communication devices makes operating remotely less of a burden than in the past and therefore we are much more efficient in our down time.

Interestingly enough you rarely see these types of perks from companies that carry their founders name and are run by members of the founder’s family.  Sure, you can site examples, but as a general rule companies that are still run by entrepreneurs see less use for $30,000 pieces of art than companies that are run by “professional” guns-for-hire.

Learning from past mistakes seems to have missed several of the characters in the books I have read.  Did we not learn from the S&L collapse that loaning too much to one group or not examining the asset closely enough is a mistake?  Did these same S&L’s not demonstrate that perils of excess?  Have we not learned from the Milken’s and Nabisco’s and Enron’s and MCI’s of the world the problems of cooking the books and short-term goals?

As an entrepreneur that has put money into my the company’s bank account to make payroll I have always looked at business as a personal statement of success … when I leave, will I be proud of what was left behind?