What do business executives do?

Answer 1

[This is an opinion of one individual, regarding business executives of large companies]

In an ideal world, business executives would raise money, promote their companies and form alliances with other companies to increase overall value and/or reduce costs. Grow the business to the benefit of the shareholders, employees and customers, equitably. Reinvest back into the company. Identify innovations, find new markets, lead by example and promote corporate responsibility. Be the champions and cheerleaders for their companies and employees.

In reality, what seems to happen include self-serving political promotion, wasting company funds and resources on inconsequential programs and brash actions masked as strategic <blank>, making change for the sake of change, acting as if they know what they were doing, or actually believing in their own self-generated hype. Reorganizing leadership structure among same people and expecting better results. Using buzz words like dashboard, leverage, strategic, alignment, innovation, scorecard, powerpoint, actionable, etc. without much meaning and even less understanding of what they are talking about. Yes, sometimes a couple of them get lucky and do some good result, even if they were irresponsibly gambling with company's future. What's often dumb luck is just simple statistical noise in the long run. If enough executives make dumb decisions, there is a statistical distribution that places some among the top 10 performers regardless of what metric you use. That's just one of ways statistics can lie.

Actually, I don't really know what they do. I work for one of the biggest companies. I (and many others in the company) only observe the consequences of business executives' actions that affects the average employees and the customers, mostly adversely. I think most of the time, they don't really know themselves what they should do. But in their positions, they are taught or are expected to show leadership and vision by those around them. An executive's career is probably a career of self-delusion into believing one's own mythology, of self worth above others, because they've convinced someone in higher management (who happens to be of similar ilk) that they are aligned with them and would maintain order and organizational structure. It's rarely about what they publicly proclaim as ideals: e.g. customer service, innovation, public service, cutting edge <blank>, global leader in <blank>, etc. Once they get used to it and get promoted, their self beliefs become further entrenched in their psyche.

There's also no shortage of smart but lazy MBA types who see, paths to easy money and can b.s. their way up the ladder. High paid business executives form a network of similarly irresponsible, short sighted, pseudo leaders who are really trying to get rich by stepping over others while talking like they will make the world a better place. The worst ones seems make the most money during the worst economic times and have the least clue about their own companies businesses.