MICHEL PIREU: Management may be in charge but companies have a life of their own
“My circle of friends includes a number of CEOs,” says Rolf Dobelli in his book The Art of the Good Life. “Some lead major corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees. They take their jobs seriously, some working themselves into the ground and earning plenty of money in recompense. Yet they are fundamentally interchangeable.
“A few short years after their retirement nobody even remembers their names. Huge firms like General Electric, Siemens or Volkswagen must have had outstanding CEOs. But who knows their names today? It’s not just that they’re interchangeable; even the company’s strong results have less to do with their decisions than with market trends as a whole.”..
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