[badloginagain]

Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.

A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.

[abakker]

this is kinda true, but only if you say, "In the short term". In the long term, things are recursive - poor employee morale loses productivity and product quality suffers and customers leave and shareholders lose. And that is only one of many loops.

A CEO may appear to be rewarded in the short term, and may make short term choices, but, rest assured that they must please all 3 constituencies or they will not have a long run timeframe to worry about. (of course, boards and ceos make mistakes and act poorly and suffer the consequences, too).

[twblalock]

"Deliver value to the shareholders" is an outcome, not an action.

How a CEO delivers value is generally by running the company well, making the right decisions, hiring the right people, making sure the company has the right product vision, etc.

If the customers aren't happy, they will buy fewer products and revenue will decline. Since a large portion of a company's stock price is connected to expectations about future earnings, that will put downward pressure on the stock and hurt the shareholders.

[aliswe]

Excellent point

[dheera]

This is an extremely flawed way to structure a society. In what messed up world does the CEO of a company have more responsibility to some armchair drugged suit-people eating Michelin food on high-rises in Manhattan than the actual billions of people who use the product on a day to day basis, and the tens of thousands of people who work half of their lives to deliver that?

[chimprich]

> Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.

Nonsense. Customer happiness, employee happiness and company performance are all related.

I used to be a Google shareholder. I got a good return for a while, but eventually I got annoyed enough as a Google customer that I decided that I didn't want to hold Google stock. This was partly emotional, and partly a prediction that their stock price was going to plateau or fall given that they were alienating their users. This seems to have been the correct decision.

> A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.

It literally does matter, because shareholders are not automatons. A lot of the economy runs on confidence. Investments aren't just made on short-term economic performance.