What companies used to do…

…there were better times. Companies used to literally feed their employees. I love it when I can use literally in a sentence properly. (Thanks, Dad!)

“You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.” -Anthony Bourdain

Before the foosball tables and cold brew stations, there was real food. In 2000, I joined a consulting firm based in a renovated mansion resting quietly along the Long Island Sound in Rowayton, CT. Breakfast, lunch, snacks galore. I think we called it the Hewitt 15 – or 20 – because of the weight many of us gained. We also walked the grounds of the property so some of the calories burned away from exercise but most calories were burned because of stress. It was a high-pressure environment but I thought I’d be able to help companies adopt electronic communicatoin, the interwebs, and look at the tools people use to get their jobs done and improve them. Employee experience mattered and I thought it’d help the world. Insert eyeroll here.

I did go to business school and clearly it wasn’t to make money. I wanted to learn about management, organization behavior, development, and I wanted to learn it from Peter Drucker. Whole other story but it collided with the explosion of the web in the mid-1990’s. This was at the stage of CEO pay ratios of we could only dream of now. Drucker warned of 20:1 or 25:1 being the outer limits of sustainability for society. Didn’t take long to take away the food and any real consideration for people.

I’d like to invite The CEO who’s list I was on this time around to visit the customer of his that is in my backyard. Then, on his dime, I’d like to share a meal with him, off the record of course, tell me why you deserve all that. What is so special about the CEO role? I asked this question to my former finance professor on a Zoom thing at the Drucker School of Management in Claremont, CA. Is CEO pay justified? What would Drucker say? Prof said being Chief is a highly specialized role. A rich – no pun intended – thing for that particular guy to say to me.

What happened to that firm with the amazing food? A confluence of events, the dot com bubble freaked people out about the internet, then 9/11 happened, the company was in pre-IPO stage at the same time, the food went away, so did people, in the name of cutting costs.

And what did that finance professor learn from Drucker? The school that still pays that professor bears the Drucker name, by the way. Unfortunately, that professor and many others learned nothing.

CEO pay ratios for publicly traded companies aren’t hard to find. Get smarter. Think about it the way Drucker did. Before it’s too late. Management, practiced well, was Drucker’s bulwark against evil.