The Half Baked Lunatic

Like everyone else, I’m completely outraged by the whole AIG bonus issue. Bonuses should reward exceptional performance and positive results.  Where’s the accountability? This has been hashed to death in the press, so I’m not going to go into all the reasons why it’s just rotten to the core. But let’s back up a little bit and see how this fits in with the bigger picture of executive compensation.  This has been an issue for many years, well before the economic downturn. It’s a big thorn in the side of many shareholders of large companies. Executive compensation needs to be tied not only to performance, but also to their own personal risk.  For example – a hired CEO brought in to run an established company has a lot less “skin in the game” than a founder who built the company from scratch, putting his or her own net worth on the line as collateral while the company was in it’s critical growth phase. It reall... [More]

The year was 1996.  My wife had graduated from Medical School a few years earlier, and she was in her second year of residency at a large university medical center. The time was about 1:45 in the morning. And we were Wrestling the Anaconda. Ok, I need to back up a little bit.  My wife did her residency in Pathology.  She studied in both Anatomic and Clinical Pathology – but this particular year was strictly clinical work.  Although most people think that pathologists primarily perform autopsies (which is the “Anatomic” branch of the specialty), the majority of pathologists are actually on the “Clinical” side of the business.  Clinical pathologists run all the hospital lab functions – blood banks, specimen analysis, frozen sections, lab tests, etc.  During surgery for example, if a doctor is removing a cancerous cyst, they will send the specimen to the lab to have the margins checked.  The pathologist needs to an... [More]