Executive salaries are routinely justified as market-based, as if there was some shortage of corporate bureaucrats ready to fill these plum positions. Some top CEOs are also business-founders and know what it is like to take a risk with their own money. In my view, the huge rewards that occasionally go to someone who sets up a new business or a new industry are fair enough. But most of the people who fill the C-level offices are not risk-takers and business-builders. They, typically, have an MBA and an elite private school background. One of their key skills is something called ‘managing upwards’. The other is a cunning ability to take credit and avoid blame. They attach themselves to mentors and build careers based on ‘follow my leader’ conformism. Whenever a serious decision has to be made, they buy in oodles of expensive expertise. Contrary to their self-serving rhetoric, they are easily replaced.

Their employees know it. They know they are not working for legends who built the business from their kitchen tables. Instead of leaders passionate about the business, they just see people who are passionate about taking as much out of the business as quickly as possible.

Avaricious corporate bureaucrats love human resources. They spend buckets of their shareholders’ funds on stuff called employee engagement, team building and so on. The worse a company’s record on environmental issues, the more dangerous its products are to human health, the more likely it is to spend up big on corporate social responsibility. And so it is with warm and fuzzy HR exercises.

But your behaviour is shaped by what you see. And over the past couple of decades, employees have seen pure greed, and much mediocrity. Why would they feel engaged by corporate leaders who rip-off the shareholders, employees and customers to line their own pockets? And who manage so poorly?