I’ve worked with some of these guys and it’s absolutely all about them, their targets, their bonuses.
One of the Goldman Sachs bosses once came up with the term ‘long term greedy’, and had his staff apply it as a principle. Basically it means ‘do the right thing by your clients and don’t screw them over’. Better to have a 20 million dollar a year client for 10 years than to screw them out of 50 million in the first year and lose them. That sounds great, but then he could afford to think that way because he knew he’d still be there, with his stock/share options, in 10 years, profiting from that long term greed.
The younger guys are absolutely, 100% motivated to make as much as possible on day one and not give a shit about the long term view. How else are they going to afford the Porsche, Rolex, summer house in the Hamptons, etc. So they’re much more interested in screwing a client over for a fast buck, or shitting on the company’s long term well-being for this year’s bonus.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. Short-term thinking is the one big bad effect of modern turbo capitalism. Since we cannot have nice things, and are stuck with the current shitty system, could we at least come up with a way to make people in positions of power interested in the long term? Like, monthly payment in stocks that they are forced to hold for ten years or so? You can get a credit against those stocks, but at the end of the day, you would need to care that the company still exists and has worth in ten years.
Shifting the bonus compensation to long-term performance instead of “this year or even this quarter” is surprisingly very difficult. People are trained to game the system. It’s how sales forces operate in most companies.
It doesn’t matter what system you implement, somebody is constantly attempting to figure out how to maximize their profit at the cost of everyone else.
The more money involved, the more convoluted the games are.
I’ve worked with some of these guys and it’s absolutely all about them, their targets, their bonuses.
One of the Goldman Sachs bosses once came up with the term ‘long term greedy’, and had his staff apply it as a principle. Basically it means ‘do the right thing by your clients and don’t screw them over’. Better to have a 20 million dollar a year client for 10 years than to screw them out of 50 million in the first year and lose them. That sounds great, but then he could afford to think that way because he knew he’d still be there, with his stock/share options, in 10 years, profiting from that long term greed.
The younger guys are absolutely, 100% motivated to make as much as possible on day one and not give a shit about the long term view. How else are they going to afford the Porsche, Rolex, summer house in the Hamptons, etc. So they’re much more interested in screwing a client over for a fast buck, or shitting on the company’s long term well-being for this year’s bonus.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. Short-term thinking is the one big bad effect of modern turbo capitalism. Since we cannot have nice things, and are stuck with the current shitty system, could we at least come up with a way to make people in positions of power interested in the long term? Like, monthly payment in stocks that they are forced to hold for ten years or so? You can get a credit against those stocks, but at the end of the day, you would need to care that the company still exists and has worth in ten years.
Shifting the bonus compensation to long-term performance instead of “this year or even this quarter” is surprisingly very difficult. People are trained to game the system. It’s how sales forces operate in most companies.
It doesn’t matter what system you implement, somebody is constantly attempting to figure out how to maximize their profit at the cost of everyone else.
The more money involved, the more convoluted the games are.