Apart from their lack of morality and tendancies toward criminality, one of the things I find most disturbing about the current crop of CEO's is that many don't seem to want to build anything. They just want to "do deals" and manipulate stock prices. Unfortunately, this creates wealth for THEM in a way that is completely unrelated to the theoretical PURPOSE of the business.
In the past thirty years, there is an outrageous history of CEO's cleaning out the wealth of a company by wounding or destroying it. "Chainsaw Al" is the cover boy of this kind of parasitic management. The fact that this man is NOT in jail is a rather telling commentary on the government's attitude toward corporate crime.
A generation ago, CEO's tended to be outstanding citizens who were leaders within their companies and their communities. There are still many examples of that type of CEO, but I'm afraid the parasites have gained the upper hand. And the government has given these people both a "hand up" and a free ride. It's very sad.
P.S. Sorry to hear about Maytag. I used to know a couple members of the Maytag family 25+ years ago.
As far as government contracts go, they all have ropes (not strings) attached so that you not only have to transform your company into a socialist utopian model but have to do business with the same.
These comments go to the culture, to the loss of Traditional American Values, to the lack of selflessness and to the high hypocrisy of the use of the term "service" by our corporate executives and politicians. This is precisely where I wanted to go with this article.
The link between (what I believe is) our coming economic decline and the degradation of our values is exceedingly real but almost wholly overlooked and misunderstood.