Here they are, courtesy of the AFL-CIO.
Number one? Aubrey K. McClendon of Chesapeake Energy, who made a cool $100,069,201 in 2008. That’s 100 million. I bet he gets his own parking space too.
Number two, at $59,834,630, is Eugene M. Isenberg of Nabors Industries, which I believe manufactures merchandise featuring the picture of fan favorite Jim “Gomer Pyle” Nabors.
At 12pm ET today, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka is holding a live webcast discussion on executive pay
Just a hunch, but I’m guessing he thinks they make too much.
And here is the union’s Executive PayWatch web site, where you can search for your favorite CEO and his compensation by company name, state, and industry.
Enjoy.
Well lookie here, we have one more OddTodd toon up our sleeve. Here’s the Tuesday Morning Coffee Show: Business Edition, in which OddTodd discusses corporate criminals and personal finance in typical vulgar fashion.
Tuesday Morning Coffee Show Bus. Ed.
From the advertising and marketing blog Thought Gadgets, this post called “Sometimes it makes sense to ignore your customers,” which debunks the notion that customer feedback through social media will provide the answer to all business problems:
Social media gurus suggest listening to customers is everything. We say it’s not.
If you pan out and look at the five real forces that drive competition, customers are only one — and the way they feel about you at any time is often not the most important factor guiding your future decisions. Yes, user-content platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube provide marketers a chance to eavesdrop on conversations; add listening tools such as Brands Eye, Radian6, ScoutLabs, TruCast, or Umbria and you can watch the “sentiment” or vibe about your brand rise and fall like a weather report. Of course you should listen for flare-ups, and if sentiment falls suddenly and sustainably, you have a structural problem in your business that must be addressed.
But consider the things consumer sentiment could not have predicted:
1. The near-death of Detroit. As late as 2005 and 2006, Americans were still in love with SUVs and big trucks. Spiking oil prices and Wall Street-fed recessions were just about to strike, but an automotive planner of the time, if given the chance to listen to consumer needs, would have designed flashy huge new trucks. GM failed because it did what customers wanted in 2005, and its business ecosystem shifted two years later.
Some academic research is obviously very dry, but boy, some isn’t. From the March 19, 2010 issue of European Sociological Review:
:
Erotic Capital
by Catherine Hakim, Department of Sociology, London School of Economic
Introduction
We present a new theory of erotic capital as a fourth personal asset, an important addition to economic, cultural, and social capital. Erotic capital has six, or possibly seven, distinct elements, one of which has been characterized as ‘emotional labour’. Erotic capital is increasingly important in the sexualized culture of affluent modern societies. Erotic capital is not only a major asset in mating and marriage markets, but can also be important in labour markets, the media, politics, advertising, sports, the arts, and in everyday social interaction. Women generally have more erotic capital than men because they work harder at it. Given the large imbalance between men and women in sexual interest over the life course, women are well placed to exploit their erotic capital. A central feature of patriarchy has been the construction of ‘moral’ ideologies that inhibit women from exploiting their erotic capital to achieve economic and social benefits. Feminist theory has been unable to extricate itself from this patriarchal perspective and reinforces ‘moral’ prohibitions on women’s sexual, social, and economic activities and women’s exploitation of their erotic capital.
Madonna flaunted it in her Sex book, and still has it at 50. Jesus Luz, her toyboy lover, clearly has it, but it is rather easier at 22 years. Pierce Brosnan has it, even as he ages, long after dropping the James Bond role. Catherine Deneuve still has it, remaining sexually attractive after she reached 60. The sexy, energetic singer Tina Turner, with her fabulous legs and erotic voice, still had it at in her 50s. The commodity is erotic capital, to which sociological and economic theory have been blind, despite its palpable importance in all spheres of social life. Writers and artists are very sensitive to it. Shakespeare captured it nicely when describing Cleopatra: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom dull her infinite variety.’ The expanding importance of self-service mating and marriage markets, speed dating, and Internet dating contributes to the increasing value of erotic capital in the 21st century. Sociology must rise to the challenge of incorporating erotic capital into theory and empirical research.
This paper presents a theory of erotic capital and its applications in studies of social mobility, the labour market, mating, and other topics. We argue that erotic capital is just as important as economic, cultural, and social capital for understanding social and economic processes, social interaction, and social mobility. It is essential for analysing sexuality and sexual relationships. There are difficulties of measurement, but these are no greater than for social capital. In sexualized individualized modern societies, erotic capital becomes more important and more valorized, for both men and women. However, women have a longer tradition of developing and exploiting it, and studies regularly find women to have greater erotic appeal than men. We ask why erotic capital has been overlooked as an asset in sociological theory. The oblivion of the social sciences to this factor suggests that a patriarchal bias still remains in these disciplines. As women generally have more erotic capital than men, so men deny it exists or has value, and have taken steps to ensure that women cannot legitimately exploit their relative advantage. Feminists have reinforced ‘moral’ objections to the deployment of erotic capital….
If you’ve been unemployed a long time, perhaps you miss the kind of electronic back-and-forth that goes on in an office. If so, check out Pretend Office. Here’s a description:
And a weird thing happened.
With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company.
Here are all the email messages about pretend matters, sorted by pretend thread, pretend subject, pretend author, and pretend date.
If you’re into the visual representation of deep data, Blytic is a site you should be hanging out at. From the About page:
Then, after users have found one or more data series interesting, they may choose to create an analysis based on that series by mixing and matching other data series or data series derivatives as well as adding annotations and other embellishments in a dynamic chart visualization then adding their own textual description and title.
Here’s an interesting chart tracking the amount of currency in circulation:
Chart topics include real estate, employment, interest rates, and taxes.
Too much? Nah. What’s the mattah with data?
From the book How to Keep Your Cool if You Lose Your Job, via Recessionwire, a chart designed to help you visualize your current level of job satisfaction, or desired level if you’re unemployed.
The head of a management consulting firm writes on his Harvard Business Review blog that companies sometimes lay off relative underperformers simply because nobody understands exactly what they do.
When the wrong person is fired, it hurts everyone involved — the person and his or her company. There’s a better way to solve this problem and a worse way. The worse way first: If you’re an employee and want to protect yourself, you can do two things:
1. Be excellent. The more effectively you deliver on your goals the less likely you’ll be let go. Employers value productivity.
2. Be confusing. The more ambiguously you achieve your goals the more difficult it will be to fire you. Employers fear uncertainty.
There are two problems with this. One, it might backfire. Being too opaque could get you fired, especially if you’re not quite as excellent as you think. And two, while this strategy might help you as an individual, it hurts the company which, eventually, will hurt you as an individual.
We got ourselves into this economic mess in part because leaders didn’t understand what was going on in their own companies. While tying a Gordian knot may help individuals keep their jobs, untying it will help the businesses stay viable. That’s the critical challenge facing industry today.
The full post here.
Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Edited and created by Public Radio Exchange (PRX). 
