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All most amusing

We know the mantra. Bosses aren’t worth that much so the bastards shouldn’t be paid a lot. copyright The Guardian and all such points left.

John Lewis is not in a crisis – it has failed to adapt
Nils Pratley

The department store chain needs fresh thinking – its incoming boss may just provide it

Oh. Bosses are important, are they?

The phrase “substantially lower” than last year’s £115m probably implies a profit figure as thin as £50m. Two years ago, the department stores made £258m. In those circumstances, the exit of Paula Nickolds, boss of the department stores, was inevitable.

And the boss gets kicked if they don’t do the important things?

Hmm, mebbe that idea about the pay needs rethinking?

23 thoughts on “All most amusing”

  1. One of the reasons bosses get paid so much is that they get to make decisions. Those decisions include firing people. Because they know the hate that comes from that.

    No-one, other than the odd sociopath, would do such horrible things if they weren’t paid for it. And by paying well you have a chance of avoiding the sociopath.

  2. If I were an FT100 CEO I’d avoid Retail and Banking to stay out of public eye

    @Chester

    They try to avoid the hate by hiring an HR New Opportunity Consultant to do the firing

  3. I don’t agree that only sociopaths fire people, and I don’t see that being paid for making such a decision has anything to do with the price of fish. It’s either a good or a bad decision. It gets no better because the decision-maker is paid for it.

    I myself am a horrid munter, who takes great pleasure in firing people and turning them and their families out in to the street.

  4. HR New Opportunity Consultant

    You misspelt “Hatchet man”.

    A mate of mine used to do this as an interim manager. He’d be brought in to do something fairly innocuous on paper while setting up the redundancy terms, ensuring legal compliance, etc., have “the talk” with the folks getting the chop and then deal with the follow-up hate and anger from the ones left before being “fired”. It was all carefully stage managed to ensure that the anger of staff was solely directed at him and they paid him very well for it.

  5. Surreptitious Evil

    I’ve been petrified about the effect I was going to have on the family, in the exemplar case, of a bloke I was very definitely going to get sacked.

    It was horrid thinking about. But, at the end of the day, if you chose to break the law, it’s not my responsibility as the lead investigator if the effects on people who rely on you are extravagant.

  6. It was horrid thinking about. But, at the end of the day, if you chose to break the law, it’s not my responsibility as the lead investigator if the effects on people who rely on you are extravagant.

    Having done it as a director of a small software house (both redundancies and terminations), it’s one of those things that it’s best to get over with as quickly and humanely as possible and then once you’ve done it see what you can do to assist the transition out of the company.

    Something along the lines of “Hi Bob, grab a seat. I’m not going to beat about the bush, but the incident on Tuesday was clearly gross misconduct on your part and while I’m sure you realise and regret those actions, I’m left with no alternative but to terminate you as per section 3 of your contract”. I’d then handover a very brief letter on company stationary stating that he’d been terminated and that would be it. Everything else would be about how he’d like to handle collecting his stuff, never having been a fan of the “black bag walk of shame”.

    Dismissals only ever relate to the actions of the 3rd party, so why should I feel bad about it?

    Equally, redundancies are just a consequence of trying to save the business as a whole rather than a reflection on the individual and I’ve always made that point clear when dealing with redundancies. It’s always better to leave with some money and dignity intact than leaving with nothing.

  7. Mediocre premier league footballers earn millions. So do FTSE 100 MDs.
    Golfers and popstars you don’t know the names of are worth 10s of millions.
    It doesn’t worry me in the slightest

  8. Might be an interesting comparison looking at salaries for coaches and managers in professional sport vs the players salaries.

  9. Bloke in North Dorset

    Redundancies are about the job and not the person, and if done properly should help the person come to terms with it. In any decent organisation there should be some notice that it is on the cards and why. Of course some people take it personally and that’s where HR earn their money.

    Misconduct etc is self inflicted and its difficult to have sympathy with the individual but we’ve all made mistakes to some extent so a bit of there but for the grace of God go I should be used. As John says, just get on with it and treat them as you’d expect to be treated.

    The difficult ones are people who are really trying but just aren’t up to it, especially if they’re likeable as people. I haven’t seen much of this but from what I’ve seen the process of giving them multiple warning and providing coaching and training can be quite dispiriting both to them and the rest of the team. The fear of them coming back with a counter claim that it was constructed dismissal is too real and ties too many hands.

    This is all why I don’t like the current vogue of making employment about being part of a “family” and “team” and making employees the centre of the universe. A good manager needs to set themselves apart and make sure everyone knows that its a job first and foremost and shouldn’t be the centre of their social and family life as well.

  10. @BiND – Yup. Can’t disagree with any of that tbqh.

    You don’t come to work to socialise, you come to get shit done and get paid. Sure, it shouldn’t be a prison like atmosphere, but it should be about what is conducive to productivity.

    Having said that, if you delivered on time, budget and specification I don’t see why you can’t take the team down the pub on Friday’s and stand at least a round, but as you say, you can’t be “One of the lads” if you’re also the one responsible for cracking the whip or it just makes you a push over.

  11. Another longer comment wiped out with the same “too fast” bs Tim. Why do you have a system that has such messages on it?

  12. Still won’t print my comment Tim. Says “duplicate” so I amend my name slightly and then it goes back to “too fast”.

    If you want me banned or something have the guts to say so directly at least. Or is this happening to anyone else. I use Windows 7–is that it?

  13. Mr Ecks. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the site is a bit fucked up after the changeover.

    Try deleting cookies (under the lock icon) and refreshing again.

  14. Thanks for your help Mr Galt–but there is no lock icon on the site–not on my screen anyway. Where should it be please?

  15. again

    “Equally, redundancies are just a consequence of trying to save the business as a whole rather than a reflection on the individual and I’ve always made that point clear when dealing with redundancies. It’s always better to leave with some money and dignity intact than leaving with nothing.”

    Fair enough at face value Mr Galt.

    But remember we now have a class of shit-useless “managers/businessmen” who ponce between businesses, 3rd sector fake charities and state pseudo-employment (the “rising liberal middle class” that fuckwit Facepainter refers to) who –Will Hutton style– fuck-up businesses and then have to sack the victims of their failure and close branches etc.

    Not unnatural that victims of such ghouls who are losing their income should feel the urge to swing a fist. Esp when they know that said ghouls will be handsomely rewarded regardless of success or failure because that is how the new boss class rolls. Did Will Hutton hit the dole queue as a reward for his failures? Or is he still being paid for talking shite?

  16. Not unnatural that victims of such ghouls who are losing their income should feel the urge to swing a fist. Esp when they know that said ghouls will be handsomely rewarded regardless of success or failure because that is how the new boss class rolls. Did Will Hutton hit the dole queue as a reward for his failures? Or is he still being paid for talking shite?

    Fair point generally, if not specifically. The guys at my company during the redundancy period knew I was taking no salary while using my own funds to keep the company going at the time with a hope that we could find a buyer or funding and continue at some later date at which time they would be free to come back if they wished.

    Unfortunately that never happened and we ended up liquidating everything, literally every stick of furniture and even the A/C units. We managed to keep it running for nearly 9-months after we lost of primary client (Maplin Electronics), but in the end it was unsustainable.

    Sometimes you just end up being shit outta luck. We were honest about that and only the employees got paid redundancy. The directors (self-included) worked for nothing for months, poured additional capital into the company and walked away with nothing.

  17. @John Galt

    Was that when Maplin ended? Reminds me of John Brown Wheels taking down Stadium etc when they went bust in 80s

  18. No. Maplin had a change of management and decided to move their internet business in-house. We had developed the website and the Java interface to their backed legacy mainframe and they were paying for both the development and hosting from us.

    Although they weren’t our only customer, they accounted for about 60% of our turnover. This was back in 1998 when things were very different in the internet business and few people where doing internet catalogue to backend integration.

    Unfortunately this was around the time of the .com bust, so got hit with a double-whammy since even nominally profitable businesses like ours were treated like dogshit.

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