Thoughts on the Tony Soprano School of Management

Robin Hanson asks:

Most people want to succeed, but most also have moral qualms about doing whatever it takes.  People with unusually strong ambitions or weak qualms, however, should be willing to do much more, even murder.  And at the top of each walk of life we expect to find a disproportionate fraction not only of high ability folks, but also of high ambition and low qualm folks. 

We thus naturally worry about finding the darkest forms of foul play at the top.  Literature is full of plausible-seeming scenarios where by leaders in government, business, and even the arts commit the most terrible crimes to get ahead.  But we tend to believe these stories more about leaders long ago or far away, and less about leaders in admirable walks of life, like religion, academia, or the arts.  Is this just wishful thinking, or is there more to it?

An interesting concrete example is corporate assassins.  We hear of assassination of leaders in crime or politics, at least far away, but less often in business.  Given how little it seems to cost to have someone killed, why don’t more corporations have their competitors’ leaders knocked off?

(HT: Josh Wright, who then spins the question of whether a corporate assasination would violate the antitrust laws.)

Posted on Wednesday, August 06 2008 | Permalink

"Given how little it seems to cost to have someone killed, why don’t more corporations have their competitors’ leaders knocked off?”

Maybe because they realize just how little the leaders really have to do with the success or failure of the enterprise?

Posted by  on  08/06  at  06:53 PM

Perhaps shareholders would wake up and realize their well paid top management aren’t worth it, and rise up and kill them all. 

Shareholders of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your overcompensated top management.

Posted by  on  08/06  at  10:52 PM

Hmm.

The Klingon Method of Effective Managerial Advancement is not used in business because business in the end is predominantly about Wealth and Status and, most of all the Business. The head of GM can be the head of GE tomorrow and of HP the day after all without killing anyone. The CEO can do this either by changing jobs or by growing his business so that it buys out the others.

Then again, the CEO is a mere hireling in most cases. The Board of Directors is his immediate employer.

Posted by  on  08/08  at  09:55 AM

Most shareholders own the shares of both companies in a rivalrous situation through their retirement accounts, which hold index funds de facto or closet.  Having one CEO kill another would set off a downward spiral (i.e., put the firms into the Defect-Defect box of a Prisoner’s Dilemma game), at great cost to me.  That is, having CEOs assassinate one another would move money from my left pocket to my right pocket, while wasting money to do so.

Posted by  on  08/08  at  10:51 AM

The real question isn’t why a CEO doesn’t kill the CEO of a rival.  It’s why heir apparents don’t kill CEOs.  I’m sure Macbeth has been staged this way.

Posted by  on  08/08  at  05:59 PM

There was a British version of Julius Caesar like this back in the 50s. All I remember is that it starred Norman Wollington.

I suspect the real reason why there are so few Busiess versions of Lear, MacBeth, or Titus Andronicus, is because most writers know nothing about the world of large corporations except what they have seen in movies and TV shows.

I really would like to see Titus set in Silicon Valley.

Posted by John Costello  on  08/10  at  08:23 PM
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