The Severance Kings: Media moguls find life much rosier in the unemployment line
By Tina Brown
... The secret back story of American business in the last two years, even before 9/11 and the corporate scandals, is how heartily all the big boys in the executive suites have hated their lives. Being a player, it seems, turned out to be too much work. The great Viagra days of the '90s -- buying another player's company over a round of golf as yours was about to detumesce -- are history. What's required now isn't Big Deals, it's Process. The headache of sweaty, detail-clogged, discussion-laden days and hours trying to make unwieldy behemoths jammed together in a blaze of publicity actually work. And if corporate largesse has already made you rich, who needs the aggravation?
That's why Elba is crowded with exiled Napoleons these days, and that's why most of them think it's a vacation paradise.
This is the interesting paradigm of 2003. Everyone who has a top job is envious of the ones who don't. The big bucks, even where they haven't evaporated, are not worth the pain of crawling home every night with a head splitting from bottom-line hysteria, vengeful shareholders, treacherous accountants, whining employees and all the stressed-out hours sitting with the corporate "public affairs specialist" spinning, spinning, spinning the circling vultures of the press. ...
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/brown/2003/01/23/kings/index.html>
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Carl
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