I hope he doesn't pay his plane tickets.

Very Bushido of him.

We should all take a lesson.

^yeah, and adopt the art of seppuku. You don't see that kind of old style dedication in American generation these days.

I'd buy him lunch.

*promote capitalist integrity.

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, November 24th, 2008 5:56pm PST - promote requested by dystopianfuturetoday.

Waiting in line to buy lunch is a bit much. His time is still worth maybe ~1 million USD a year in terms of the productivity he brings to the economy, even if he declines the paycheck.

that's awesome.

Miyamoto still takes an artists paycheck too.
The dude is the creator of mario, zelda, wario...and just about EVERY other thing that MADE nintendo what it is today.

Good leaders lead from the front, and bleed with their troops. Only natural that they should also eat with them. Not this officer enlisted men split that the US has.

Historical Anecdote:
The reason they split officers from Enlisted men is that the officers do not grow attached to those men, because they may have to order them to their deaths.

>> ^chilaxe:
Waiting in line to buy lunch is a bit much. His time is still worth maybe ~1 million USD a year in terms of the productivity he brings to the economy, even if he declines the paycheck.

he even laughs like an Asimo Robot...

>> ^chilaxe:
Waiting in line to buy lunch is a bit much. His time is still worth maybe ~1 million USD a year in terms of the productivity he brings to the economy, even if he declines the paycheck.

Obviously he disagrees. His behavior says that he knows he's no more valuable than his other employees, that without them his company couldn't function, but without him, it'd probably get on just fine. And that is something that US CEO's refuse to accept.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
Good leaders lead from the front, and bleed with their troops. Only natural that they should also eat with them. Not this officer enlisted men split that the US has.
Historical Anecdote:
The reason they split officers from Enlisted men is that the officers do not grow attached to those men, because they may have to order them to their deaths.

Some might say that that detachment allows command to make poor decisions about the lives of their men. I mean who would want to start wars and invade nations if they actually valued the lives of the people they were condemning to death.

^ You're right on your first point, but you missed your second one by about three lightyears.

We're talking about officers of a company/battery and the 130 or so men they command. Not the Generals and Colonels who command entire brigades/Divisions.

To put it simply: You are the enlisted man and your immediate supervisor would be the officer we're talking about. You're talking about the owner of the company being the officer.

NordlichReiter's historic anecdote is very true. When I had command over Marines I found it difficult at times to make even simple choices about who would do something like take out the trash. I always wanted to send the people I wasn't friends with, but I knew that it was my duty to assign duties fairly, even if that meant pissing my friends off by telling them they had to take the trash out.

This guy is a *humanitarian.

Adding video to channels (Humanitarian) - requested by MarineGunrock.

>> ^chilaxe:
Waiting in line to buy lunch is a bit much. His time is still worth maybe ~1 million USD a year in terms of the productivity he brings to the economy, even if he declines the paycheck.



Nah. He's one man who could be replaced by another, and he knows it. There are no "super geniuses" running our corporations. They're mostly über-greedy MBA's, silver-spooners or worse, who think they "deserve" all the riches they can get their greedy mitts on.

I want to send this video to Waxman. They should play it in their meetings with all these fucked CEO's who've basically destroyed our productivity.

It sounds like you guys are saying business and organizational administration are the only professional activities in which skill doesn't matter. When you need a doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer, marketer, creative professional, etc. you get what you pay for. Large-scale management and business strategy is enormously complicated.

The day that doctors, teachers, and nurses are as financially rewarded as athletes, celebrities, and CEOs is the day that we'll be done with this "bubble" economy.

The best part, 'tho, is when he gets slammed on sake every Friday and runs through the Genzu yelling, "You want MIRRON DORRAS? FUCK YOU! HAVE BOMB INSTEAD!"

>> ^chilaxe:
It sounds like you guys are saying business and organizational administration are the only professional activities in which skill doesn't matter. When you need a doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer, marketer, creative professional, etc. you get what you pay for. Large-scale management and business strategy is enormously complicated.


Skill absolutely matters in these roles, they are controlling the fate of the company and as such hundreds or thousands of jobs and huge amounts of money. Bad leadership CAN indeed make huge impacts on many, many people (Read just about every US and Australian car manufacturer leadership for the past x decades).

BUT, what is disgusting, is when CEOs continue to ramp up their pay while slashing jobs and wages all over a company. They continue to give themselves pay rises, and those of their close lackeys, but make life horrible for those in the lower rungs of the company. THAT is not right. If the company is falling on hard times, it is usually to do with poor leadership, so there is no justifiable reason why they should be getting more money.

Perhaps slashing his salary to such a low level that he is starting to have financial issues himself isn't the best idea, as it may divert his attention from his job of getting the company back on track, but not giving himself pay rises is indeed the right move.

>> ^StukaFox:
The best part, 'tho, is when he gets slammed on sake every Friday and runs through the Genzu yelling, "You want MIRRON DORRAS? FUCK YOU! HAVE BOMB INSTEAD!"


ARGH! My head is exploding from this comment. I almost upvoted because it made me lmfahs, but then I almost downvoted because it is so racist. AGH!

SO FUNNY! BUT SO RACIST! :head explode:

Wonder how many shares and perks he has - it's not all about the salary...

I think this undervalues his time, his role, his responsiblities. I do not think it is right for American CEO to pay themselves millions in cash and stock when a company is tanking and requesting handouts, BUT I do not think any CEO should saddle themselves with tasks which take a lot of time for little return (added up over months).

upvote for the laugh at American CEO's salaries

Very nice. Why can we not have a CEO like that ?

>> ^vanyelO_o:
Wonder how many shares and perks he has - it's not all about the salary...


Page 42 of http://www.jal.com/en/ir/pdf/ir_080606.pdf says he owns 17000
shares, which are worth about $40k going by the ADR price and ratio.


So not much.

>> ^MarineGunrock:
^ You're right on your first point, but you missed your second one by about three lightyears.
We're talking about officers of a company/battery and the 130 or so men they command. Not the Generals and Colonels who command entire brigades/Divisions.
To put it simply: You are the enlisted man and your immediate supervisor would be the officer we're talking about. You're talking about the owner of the company being the officer.
NordlichReiter's historic anecdote is very true. When I had command over Marines I found it difficult at times to make even simple choices about who would do something like take out the trash. I always wanted to send the people I wasn't friends with, but I knew that it was my duty to assign duties fairly, even if that meant pissing my friends off by telling them they had to take the trash out.

I know what you're referring to, and I think you misunderstood NordlichReiter's intent. He was saying that the best leaders have been ones that considered themselves part of the team, something that doesn't happen very much in the US.

But when you think of it the military analogy fits corporate life. Generals are CEOs, employees are their troops. And if you look at it that way, the detachment of a General and their troops can equate to that of a CEO and their employees, where as a General may have to sacrifice lives, a CEO can be in a situation to sacrifice jobs. Something far more difficult to do if you know the people facing the chopping block.

I was middle management at my old job and like you was friends with some of my team. Unlike you though, I didn't have any difficulty assigning work equally to my staff. And when times got tough, I did everything I could to keep everyone on spreading the workload as thin as I could, rather than terminating anyone because I knew how devastating it could be for them. In the end I took the hit and lost my job, but all my employees continue to work. My boss on the other hand, was only looking at the bottom line and didn't care who lost their job.

In the end, the CEO followed the vision of the company. That CEO also realizes that getting 90K is enough for him and his family to survive through this rough economy. He knows that it'll work out in the end.

shit 90k US per year in Japan is like McDonald's wages.

If you think this CEO is wierd, try Ingvar Kamprad on for size. Ok, he may be the 2nd richest guy on earth or something, but he still demands his coffee should be free at Ikea at breakfast hours (he even hurries to get there by 11.00) And he founded and owns Ikea.

This is silly. Japan is still first and foremost an Asian culture built upon social hierarchy. This is a great CEO and an example to all, but I hate its inference that all Japanese CEOs are like this and all US CEOs are megalomaniacs by cherry-picking one company from each country.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. But unfortunately, the middle is never a good story.

>> ^lertad:
This is silly. Japan is still first and foremost an Asian culture built upon social hierarchy. This is a great CEO and an example to all, but I hate its inference that all Japanese CEOs are like this and all US CEOs are megalomaniacs by cherry-picking one company from each country.
The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. But unfortunately, the middle is never a good story.

Japan is indeed a hierarchical society, but it is a society where when an employee bows the boss bows too. What you're missing is that the American society is as much if not more hierarchical than Japan, only that fact is not formally recognized. The difference is that the American hierarchy is based on money more than on position. That's why there's idiots everywhere finding excuses for the ridiculous salaries of American C.E.O. Basically, the rationalizations are all based on the illusion called the "American Dream": maybe some day you too will be filthy rich, then you certainly wouldn't want a mob trying to put you down! In comparison, most Japanese know their place and will only accept what they can reciprocate: for example they will accept a raise only if they feel they can take on more responsibilities, even if they're in lower management and know they have no chance at a promotion because of the position game (of course, as in everything there are exceptions).

>> ^DrPawn:
Very nice. Why can we not have a CEO like that ?


They don't get a lot of attention, but we do. We'd have a lot more, unfortunately our socialist government feels it necessary to subsidize overpaid and corrupt companies with money appropriated from underpaid ones. The beauty of free market capitalism is that when a company leader abuses precious capital by using it to simply overpay themselves for no additional production, a competitor will invariably take that opportunity to invest or lower prices rather than give it to themselves, thereby forcing the other company to do the same or fail.

This would happen a lot more often if we didn't have what has become known as "corporate welfare." Since people continue to enable the appropriation and redistribution of taxes/inflation on vast levels by voting for socialist republicrats every election cycle, we see a tremendous amount of subsidization that begets self-perpetuating fraud and excess. This is the act in which a socialist government engages: a tax is forcibly appropriated money, and it is levied on all, but distributed to select entities. Those entities tend to be the ones who are the most overpaid and corrupt, because those are the types of entities that bribe politicians into doing so. Without income taxes or a fiat reserve currency, this would all be impossible.

Unfortunately, only 3% of America understands libertarian concepts fully, so we're essentially doomed to another lengthy depression. Europe is somewhat spared from this because

(a) their fiat currency is not the reserve currency. They did not have the capacity to export their inflation abroad and distort the direction of their economies into a service sector, non-manufacturing house of cards dependent on foreign credit to consume foreign production. If they're smart, they will only suffer to extent that they loaned us money that we are trying to pay back with a printing press instead of a manufactured product.
(b) they don't have a gargantuan military empire.

All else is practically equal, they suffer from the same tax-and-inflate socialist policies that plague us today. It's just that we've taken it a step further. It's a complete U-turn from our original principles that got us from nothing to world power. And socialism will lead us back down to third-world status when the dollar finally collapses and the trillions sitting in foreign vaults comes home to roost.

when a company loses money, often the first person to receive blame is the CEO. by accepting a low salary, he becomes popular with the workers and gains support which helps him keep his job. this makes it for a board of directors to fire him, when it might have been a better for the company (and thus for the workers) to take on a new, better CEO. put it on the local news, and just try and fire him.

nobody turns down $1,000,0000 for the "sake of the company" when the ink runs red, they are doing it for the sake of their own job. he will wait it out and happily take the $5,000,000 a year again when the ink turns black. show me a CEO at the height of profit margins who accepts a lower salary than offered, and i'll point you to a "humanitarian". once again, by looking at everything skin-deep, the whole point was missed and a typical, "selfish", CEO is being praised as the next mother teresa.

sly CEO: 1
two dozen videosift posters: 0

>> ^imstellar28:
when a company loses money, often the first person to receive blame is the CEO. by accepting a low salary, he becomes popular with the workers and gains support which helps him keep his job. this makes it for a board of directors to fire him, when it might have been a better for the company (and thus for the workers) to take on a new, better CEO. put it on the local news, and just try and fire him.
nobody turns down $1,000,0000 for the "sake of the company" when the ink runs red, they are doing it for the sake of their own job. he will wait it out and happily take the $5,000,000 a year again when the ink turns black. show me a CEO at the height of profit margins who accepts a lower salary than offered, and i'll point you to a "humanitarian". once again, by looking at everything skin-deep, the whole point was missed and a typical, "selfish", CEO is being praised as the next mother teresa.
sly CEO: 1
two dozen videosift posters: 0


Dude, are you on crack, cocaine, or both? Read the background. He took over this year after they ousted the last CEO for incompetence. He got the job in the first place once it was all bad.

If anything, this helped me ask (or FORCE) the labour unions to accept cutbacks in their pay. Sharing the pain all around, not just grandstanding, silly.

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, November 24th, 2008 7:46pm PST - promote requested by mkone.

>> ^imstellar28:
when a company loses money, often the first person to receive blame is the CEO. by accepting a low salary, he becomes popular with the workers and gains support which helps him keep his job. this makes it for a board of directors to fire him, when it might have been a better for the company (and thus for the workers) to take on a new, better CEO. put it on the local news, and just try and fire him.
nobody turns down $1,000,0000 for the "sake of the company" when the ink runs red, they are doing it for the sake of their own job. he will wait it out and happily take the $5,000,000 a year again when the ink turns black. show me a CEO at the height of profit margins who accepts a lower salary than offered, and i'll point you to a "humanitarian". once again, by looking at everything skin-deep, the whole point was missed and a typical, "selfish", CEO is being praised as the next mother teresa.
sly CEO: 1
two dozen videosift posters: 0


I can't show you a CEO who has turned down high pay when a company was in the black, but we do have an abundance ... an overabundance of CEOs who have padded themselves in luxury while their companies fell into ruin.

For now he is doing the right thing, which many others have not. We should look upon him favorably for it.

Really, even in our heavily flawed world there's such a thing as being too cynical.

If you shout "Who wants a million dollars?" you get a line of random greedy idiots.

If you shout "Who wants to run group of people's lives and take responsibility for their future regardles of your own personal income?" .... you get a better quality line of people.

Japanese CEO's need to learn the principle of "weak and shit" that Steven Levitt highlights in his TED talk, a principle that all US CEOs follow.

*nominate man of the year

Steve Jobs only make a buck per year.

*dead

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