Open post: The buck stops.... where?
One of the interesting questions of the new century is this: how much blame does a chief executive of a company or a nation deserve when things go wrong on his/her watch? Of course, the easiest answer is that the buck has to stop somewhere, and it should stop with the most powerful individual in the organization. However, I don't believe this should always be the case. Two cases in particular highlight the complexity:- Ken Lay and Enron - from my previous posts, you already know that Lay was not involved in the scandal. He was simply very naive. Even though he was CEO for almost all of the time the troubles were occurring, he was very hands-off - Skilling was handling the day to day operations long before he actually assumed the CEO title. As the top guy at Enron, how much blame does Lay deserve? How responsible is he for the actions of his underlings which he was unaware of? If held to the ultimate standard (i.e. conviction in court, jail time), how are CEO's in the future supposed to delegate work? How much should he have known so that he could have smelled something fishy when the special purpose entities were discussed in board meetings, for example?
- Bush and Iraqi WMD's - if the director of the CIA tells you that WMD's in Iraq are a "slam dunk" (that is a direct quote from Bob Woodward's book covering the run-up to the Iraq War), how much blame should a president absorb if that claim turns out to not be true? It's not like Bush did the interrogations himself, or analyzed the satellite photos himself - his knowledge was limited to what the intelligence services told him, and they failed miserably. Is it his fault that they failed? Does the buck ultimately stop with him? How much blame should go the CIA? The left will tell you that it is all Bush's fault, and that he politicized the intelligence process to get the conclusion that he wanted so he could go to war, but this notion has been thoroughly investigated and discredited by bipartisan government commissions.
I suppose these two cases bring the more focused question to light: if your underlings fail spectacularly and you are effectively blindsided by it, how much blame do you bear simply because you are their boss?
Again, this is an open post. I don't pretend to know the answer to this question. I welcome your comments (as always).
posted by JM @ 4:20 PM
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