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How About In 2025 We Throw Some Incompetent CEOs In Prison?
Society has a problem with people being rewarded handsomely for being terrible at their jobs.
Before we get going on what I promise won’t be entirely a socialist rant I’m going to give a pre-amble from my own experience in the UK charity sector. I was briefly employed by a (remaining nameless) NGO, they had been given a hefty chunk of money by an (also nameless) Government department to run a project.
The project was about bringing disparate groups of young people of different faiths together in a community-based project. They were delighted and took the money, failing to point out the one fatal flaw in their otherwise perfect plan.
Nobody in the office knew how to do this in practice.
They had a handsomely-paid CEO, a project manager, a marketing team, and a comms department who were well oiled. What they lacked was any skill with young people or an actual overarching strategy.
The CEO’s plan was to hand everything over to the project manager, who in turn would run down the clock then offer to give the money back because, lo and behold, the project was undeliverable. On this occasion though, the minister didn’t want the money back. The minister wanted a project.
The NGO panicked and the CEO immediatley went off on ‘long term sick’.
My name was eventually thrown at the slightly ashen project manager as someone with the skills to coordinate young people and work to a tight deadline. The project manager had, until this point, been fobbing off the CEO and lying to the rest of the team about how far along the project was.
I had a meeting with him and agreed to come on board as a consultant, two days later he also went off with ‘stress’ then subsequently quit.
As an aside, I heard on the grapevine he popped up again in a different job elsewhere in the NGO world as though nothing had happened. Ironic really, because nothing had happened and this was largely the problem I was brought into solve.
I never saw him again, which is a shame as there were a lot of empty folders and unfinished blank documents I needed to shout at him about.
