"Love of self until God is forgotten or love of God until self is forgotten."
St Augustine
Heaven or hell must just be the natural outcome resulting from which of those two paths we choose....
Monday, November 15, 2004
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Frederick Beuchner - one of my favourite authors
A reprint of the "The Door Interview"
Buech-ner, Fred-er-ick (Beek'ner),n. 1. A twentieth-century writer/minister. 2. Location: Vermont- as in rambling New England farm complete with rambling New England house.
Background (bak'ground), n. 1. One's training and experience. 2.Union Seminary. 3. Teacher at Exeter (Eastern Prep School). 4. Writer- more than two dozen books; a 1980 Pulitzer Prize nominee for his novel Godric. 5. Married. Three children. All girls.
Books (books), n. 1. Printed works on sheets of paper bound together, sometimes between hard covers. 2. Whistling in the Dark. 3. A Room Called Remember. 4. Peculiar Treasures. 5. The Book of Bebb.
Pho-bi-a (fo'bee-ah),n. 1. An irrational, excessive, and persistent fear of something. Example: Frederick Buechner refuses to fly anywhere.
Pig (pig), n. 1. A domesticated animal with broad snout and fat body; swine, hog. 2. Enormous black-and-white pet of Buechner family. 3. Name: Piggy.
Gift (gift), n. 1. A natural ability; i.e., makes gospel new and alive while using the unfamiliar, the unexpected. 2. Ability to give new insight by not speaking in cliches.
Worthwhile (wurth whil), adj. 1. Worth the time effort spent; of true value, as in the statement, "This interview is worthwhile."
DOOR: It is kind of refreshing to meet someone who speaks about the Christian faith in a new way, at least a new way to us. What is your connection with the church?
BUECHNER: To be honest, I grew up without any real church connection. When I was young, I was nominally an Episcopalian. I was confirmed, but had no strong connection.
DOOR: But you are a Presbyterian. How did that come about?
BUECHNER: It was really almost a matter of tossing a coin. When it came time to be ordained (I had to be ordained in some particular church), I chose Presbyterian, basically because of George Buttrick. It was in his church that the whole thing came alive.
DOOR: What happened?
BUECHNER: Years ago I had decided to move to New York and become a writer. While I was there, I drifted into George Buttrick's church on a Sunday morning- for no good reason, really, except it was there and I had nothing else to do. Buttrick preached the sermon, and he was talking about coronations. (He was a marvelous preacher because he had no finesse. He plucked at his robes and mumbled his words, which made him all the more powerful.) This was at the time of the present Queen's coronation, and he was talking about Jesus at the time of his temptation. He said that Jesus was offered a crown, like Queen Elizabeth's, if he would kneel down and worship Satan, but he turned it down. Then Buttrick said, "But now Jesus is crowned in the heart of the believer," and he used this phrase, "among tears and confession and great laughter." For reasons I've never been able to explain, that phrase "great laughter" absolutely decimated me. I found tears spouting in my eyes. If one were looking for the "born-again" experience, in some funny way, this was it. I couldn't have told you then, nor can I tell you now, why the phrase "great laughter" did it. Maybe it was the laughter of incredulity that perhaps it was true, or the laughter of relief that all the things that might have been true, instead weren't.
DOOR: Is it the thought that the gospel is really true that overwhelms you?
BUECHNER: It's sort of a continuing dim spectacle of the subterranean presence of grace in the world that haunts me. If you look deeply enough into yourself or into the New York Times, there are many mysteries. And the mystery of the mysteries at the bottom of the well, at the far reach of the road, is the mystery of God, of Christ. This is what I explore as a novelist- the incredibleness of it, the spectrum of it. It seems as if maybe it isn't true... but, yes, maybe it is true! And the moments when it seems to be true are just staggering moments.
DOOR: You are an ordained Presbyterian minister?
BUECHNER: Yes, but I'm afraid I'm a bad Presbyterian. Just the other day I was invited to give a talk on "Why I Am a Presbyterian." I told them I couldn't possibly, because I don't know why I'm a Presbyterian.
DOOR: That probably doesn't make the Presbyterian fathers very happy, does it?
BUECHNER In fact, I keep getting letters from the Presbyterian church asking how I justify my ordination. It is a question that absolutely makes my scalp go cold. How can anybody "justify" his ministry? Is the ministry or the priesthood something you can put on and take off? What they are saying to me is, "You've taken off your coat of ministry, so let us take you off the rolls." Something in me just rises up in horror. I was ordained an evangelist. If an evangelist preaches the Christian faith as best he can, then that's what I've spent my life doing.
DOOR: Being an evangelist, you must have heard of the four spiritual laws?
BUECHNER: I can't say that I have.
DOOR: And you call yourself an evangelist? Bill Bright would not be happy.
BUECHNER: Who is Bill Bright?
DOOR: Seriously? You have never heard of the founder and president of Campus Crusade, an evangelical organization committed to reaching the world by 1984? An organization in the process of raising one billion dollars to reach the world for Christ?
BUECHNER: He hasn't reached me.
DOOR: Your religious books don't seem very religious, which is a compliment, by the way.
BUECHNER: Well, I've never learned to talk about the Christian faith in the accustomed way. I've talked about it the only way I can. In some ways it has created a dilemma for me as a writer, because my religious books are too colloquial and too secular for church people, yet too churchy for secular people.
DOOR: So are you primarily a writer who happens to be a minister, or a minister who happens to be a writer?
BUECHNER: People sometimes say to me, "Why did you get out of the ministry?" I find that deeply upsetting, because I don't, in any sense, think of myself as giving up the ministry. But I do think of writing as a ministry.
DOOR: The Bible is very important in the evangelical church. There is a lot of discussion about the inerrancy issue. In your books, you seem to approach the Bible in a unique way. How do you read the Bible?
BUECHNER: How many ways are there to read the Bible? You can read it devotionally, and I suppose I do that somewhat, St. Paul especially. But I don't want to give the impression that I'm a great Bible reader. I don't sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure... which is the last thing I would have suspected. It's fun to read. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it's fascinating.
DOOR: Is the Bible truth?
BUECHNER: There is a wonderful piece by Karl Barth in a book called The Word of God, The Word of Man. He says that reading the Bible is like looking down from a building onto the street and seeing everyone looking up, pointing at something. Because of the way the window is situated, you can't see what they're seeing but you realize they are seeing something of extraordinary importance. That is what it is like to read the Bible. It's full of people, all pointing up at some extraordinary event. All those different fingers are pointing at truth; all those different voices are babbling about truth in all the Bible's different forms.
DOOR: But what is the truth the fingers are pointing at?
BUECHNER: Well, the truth has to do basically with the presence of God in history, the presence of God in the tangled history of Israel, of all places, and the tangled histories of us all. The truth is very hard to verbalize without making it sound like a platitude framed on a minister's wall. It is a living truth in the sense that it is better experienced than explained. Not even the Bible can contain it finally, but only point to it.
DOOR: You mentioned in your book Wishful Thinking that reading the Bible as literature is like reading Moby Dick as a whaling manual. As evangelicals, our problem seems to be the opposite- an extreme literalism that reads the Bible as a whaling manual rather than literature.
BUECHNER: You can't listen to some of the more blood-curdling psalms without feeling they've got something basically wrong. The one I always think of is Psalm 137:9, "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." Something has gone wrong. That must be an imperfect expression of the majesty of God. But I would want to be very careful with the one who does take the Bible literally. We had a baby-sitter once who was very fundamentalistic. She became a Jehovah's Witness later on. She would say to me, "Mr. Buechner, I will not allow my children to take the Salk vaccine because the Bible says you are not to eat blood, and everyone knows there is blood in the Salk vaccine. What do you think?" Part of me wanted to say that such a response was a travesty, and suggest that, of course, her children should have the Salk vaccine. But I always drew back from saying that, because I was afraid that if I destroyed that way of reading the Bible, I might destroy all sorts of other things. But I have always had the feeling that to take things literally may be closer to the truth than some of the more sophisticated ways of looking at the Bible. If you want to talk of being literally washed in the blood of the lamb, there is something in me that recoils from that. Yet, in another sense, I'd rather have that kind of language used as an expression of experience of Christ than whatever it might be watered down to.
DOOR: What does the Bible tell you about Jesus Christ?
BUECHNER: He's central. I mean, he's there even when he's not being talked about. I never felt that so much as I did while reading the book of Job, the other day- Christ in Job, the innocent sufferer. Christ is an enormously moving figure. I never cease to be moved to the roots of my being. (I'm even moved now thinking about him.) It is only his friends who make him boring. You'd think he'd grow stale after a while. Certainly, the Bible can grow stale, but I've never found him to grow stale. I've never been bored by him.
DOOR: Is the Bible primarily a book of rules, principles, and norms set down for us to follow?
BUECHNER: I don't feel that. At least that's not what I hear. To me, the most precious words of his are, "Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden." I can hardly speak those words without getting a lump in my throat. It is as though the Jesus that comes through to me is less a lawgiver, for all his giving of laws, than a speaker of a stern and loving word. What I hear is his great openness. What I experience is the opening up of a whole new range of possibilities. Jesus has the invitation. He's the inviter, the opener of doors. Falling back on biblical images, he opens the door, and a light floods through that you never dreamed possible.
DOOR: Your book Telling the Truth is subtitled The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Of course, the most intriguing part of that is your concept of the gospel as fairy tale. What do you mean?
BUECHNER: I mean the idea of preaching the gospel in all its preposterousness and not trying to water it down. The gospel does have many of the earmarks of a fairy tale. In fairy tales you have the poor boy who becomes rich, the leaden cabinet which turns out to have the treasure in it, the ugly duckling who turns out to be a swan, the frog who becomes a prince. Then we come to the gospel, where it's the Pharisees, the good ones, who turn out to be the villians. It's the whores and tax collectors who turn out to be the good ones. Just as in fairy tales, there is the impossible happy ending when Cinderella does marry the prince, and the ugly duckling is transformed into a swan, so Jesus is not, in the end, defeated. He rises again. In all these ways there is a kind of fairy tale quality to the gospel, with the extraordinary difference, of course, that this is the fairy tale that claims to be true. The difference is that this time it's not just a story being told- it's an event. It did happen! Here's a fairy tale come true.
DOOR: It seems that many of us have tried to squeeze the fairy-tale quality out of the gospel. We have taken the peace that passes understanding and made it the peace everyone can understand.
BUECHNER: One of the greatest temptations, of course, in trying to sell something is to put it in terms that people will find palatable and swallowable. To reduce it to something that others will find in their powers to believe. But maybe the best apologetics is to present the truth as it really is. Why not present the gospel in all its madness? Why not say things like, "Yes, you will be given your life back again. Yes, it doesn't end with death. Yes, the kingdom will come. Yes, Christ will come down from heaven." Maybe people are hungry for these wild and mad things which some preachers attempt to pull down to earth.
DOOR: How do we keep our eyes open to the fairy-tale quality of the gospel?
BUECHNER: There has always been a certain mystery to me about Jesus' saying that we must become like children. I think that is the answer to your question. A lot of what I'm trying to do as a preacher and writer is to reawaken the child in people. The child is the one who trusts. The child will at least go and look for the magic place. The child is the one who is not ashamed of not knowing the answers, because he's not expected to know the answers. Maybe this is part of calling the gospel a fairy tale. Who believes more in fairy tales than a child? Therefore, maybe we need to speak to the child in people, who can indeed believe.
DOOR: You are invited to speak to ministers a great deal. What do you tell them?
BUECHNER: I tell them that a minister has only two stories to tell. One is the story of Jesus. The other is his own story. Most ministers don't dare tell their own stories- the ups and downs, the darks and lights. In a sense, the two stories are the same story. The parallels are not exact... Jesus is tempted and resists; we are tempted and don't resist. Of course, all ministers draw some stories from their lives- what somebody said or something that happened, but I mean more than that. If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth (which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.) Many ministers agree that this is the way they should bear witness to their faith, but instead of drawing on their lives for truth, they draw on it only for anecdote.
Buech-ner, Fred-er-ick (Beek'ner),n. 1. A twentieth-century writer/minister. 2. Location: Vermont- as in rambling New England farm complete with rambling New England house.
Background (bak'ground), n. 1. One's training and experience. 2.Union Seminary. 3. Teacher at Exeter (Eastern Prep School). 4. Writer- more than two dozen books; a 1980 Pulitzer Prize nominee for his novel Godric. 5. Married. Three children. All girls.
Books (books), n. 1. Printed works on sheets of paper bound together, sometimes between hard covers. 2. Whistling in the Dark. 3. A Room Called Remember. 4. Peculiar Treasures. 5. The Book of Bebb.
Pho-bi-a (fo'bee-ah),n. 1. An irrational, excessive, and persistent fear of something. Example: Frederick Buechner refuses to fly anywhere.
Pig (pig), n. 1. A domesticated animal with broad snout and fat body; swine, hog. 2. Enormous black-and-white pet of Buechner family. 3. Name: Piggy.
Gift (gift), n. 1. A natural ability; i.e., makes gospel new and alive while using the unfamiliar, the unexpected. 2. Ability to give new insight by not speaking in cliches.
Worthwhile (wurth whil), adj. 1. Worth the time effort spent; of true value, as in the statement, "This interview is worthwhile."
DOOR: It is kind of refreshing to meet someone who speaks about the Christian faith in a new way, at least a new way to us. What is your connection with the church?
BUECHNER: To be honest, I grew up without any real church connection. When I was young, I was nominally an Episcopalian. I was confirmed, but had no strong connection.
DOOR: But you are a Presbyterian. How did that come about?
BUECHNER: It was really almost a matter of tossing a coin. When it came time to be ordained (I had to be ordained in some particular church), I chose Presbyterian, basically because of George Buttrick. It was in his church that the whole thing came alive.
DOOR: What happened?
BUECHNER: Years ago I had decided to move to New York and become a writer. While I was there, I drifted into George Buttrick's church on a Sunday morning- for no good reason, really, except it was there and I had nothing else to do. Buttrick preached the sermon, and he was talking about coronations. (He was a marvelous preacher because he had no finesse. He plucked at his robes and mumbled his words, which made him all the more powerful.) This was at the time of the present Queen's coronation, and he was talking about Jesus at the time of his temptation. He said that Jesus was offered a crown, like Queen Elizabeth's, if he would kneel down and worship Satan, but he turned it down. Then Buttrick said, "But now Jesus is crowned in the heart of the believer," and he used this phrase, "among tears and confession and great laughter." For reasons I've never been able to explain, that phrase "great laughter" absolutely decimated me. I found tears spouting in my eyes. If one were looking for the "born-again" experience, in some funny way, this was it. I couldn't have told you then, nor can I tell you now, why the phrase "great laughter" did it. Maybe it was the laughter of incredulity that perhaps it was true, or the laughter of relief that all the things that might have been true, instead weren't.
DOOR: Is it the thought that the gospel is really true that overwhelms you?
BUECHNER: It's sort of a continuing dim spectacle of the subterranean presence of grace in the world that haunts me. If you look deeply enough into yourself or into the New York Times, there are many mysteries. And the mystery of the mysteries at the bottom of the well, at the far reach of the road, is the mystery of God, of Christ. This is what I explore as a novelist- the incredibleness of it, the spectrum of it. It seems as if maybe it isn't true... but, yes, maybe it is true! And the moments when it seems to be true are just staggering moments.
DOOR: You are an ordained Presbyterian minister?
BUECHNER: Yes, but I'm afraid I'm a bad Presbyterian. Just the other day I was invited to give a talk on "Why I Am a Presbyterian." I told them I couldn't possibly, because I don't know why I'm a Presbyterian.
DOOR: That probably doesn't make the Presbyterian fathers very happy, does it?
BUECHNER In fact, I keep getting letters from the Presbyterian church asking how I justify my ordination. It is a question that absolutely makes my scalp go cold. How can anybody "justify" his ministry? Is the ministry or the priesthood something you can put on and take off? What they are saying to me is, "You've taken off your coat of ministry, so let us take you off the rolls." Something in me just rises up in horror. I was ordained an evangelist. If an evangelist preaches the Christian faith as best he can, then that's what I've spent my life doing.
DOOR: Being an evangelist, you must have heard of the four spiritual laws?
BUECHNER: I can't say that I have.
DOOR: And you call yourself an evangelist? Bill Bright would not be happy.
BUECHNER: Who is Bill Bright?
DOOR: Seriously? You have never heard of the founder and president of Campus Crusade, an evangelical organization committed to reaching the world by 1984? An organization in the process of raising one billion dollars to reach the world for Christ?
BUECHNER: He hasn't reached me.
DOOR: Your religious books don't seem very religious, which is a compliment, by the way.
BUECHNER: Well, I've never learned to talk about the Christian faith in the accustomed way. I've talked about it the only way I can. In some ways it has created a dilemma for me as a writer, because my religious books are too colloquial and too secular for church people, yet too churchy for secular people.
DOOR: So are you primarily a writer who happens to be a minister, or a minister who happens to be a writer?
BUECHNER: People sometimes say to me, "Why did you get out of the ministry?" I find that deeply upsetting, because I don't, in any sense, think of myself as giving up the ministry. But I do think of writing as a ministry.
DOOR: The Bible is very important in the evangelical church. There is a lot of discussion about the inerrancy issue. In your books, you seem to approach the Bible in a unique way. How do you read the Bible?
BUECHNER: How many ways are there to read the Bible? You can read it devotionally, and I suppose I do that somewhat, St. Paul especially. But I don't want to give the impression that I'm a great Bible reader. I don't sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure... which is the last thing I would have suspected. It's fun to read. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it's fascinating.
DOOR: Is the Bible truth?
BUECHNER: There is a wonderful piece by Karl Barth in a book called The Word of God, The Word of Man. He says that reading the Bible is like looking down from a building onto the street and seeing everyone looking up, pointing at something. Because of the way the window is situated, you can't see what they're seeing but you realize they are seeing something of extraordinary importance. That is what it is like to read the Bible. It's full of people, all pointing up at some extraordinary event. All those different fingers are pointing at truth; all those different voices are babbling about truth in all the Bible's different forms.
DOOR: But what is the truth the fingers are pointing at?
BUECHNER: Well, the truth has to do basically with the presence of God in history, the presence of God in the tangled history of Israel, of all places, and the tangled histories of us all. The truth is very hard to verbalize without making it sound like a platitude framed on a minister's wall. It is a living truth in the sense that it is better experienced than explained. Not even the Bible can contain it finally, but only point to it.
DOOR: You mentioned in your book Wishful Thinking that reading the Bible as literature is like reading Moby Dick as a whaling manual. As evangelicals, our problem seems to be the opposite- an extreme literalism that reads the Bible as a whaling manual rather than literature.
BUECHNER: You can't listen to some of the more blood-curdling psalms without feeling they've got something basically wrong. The one I always think of is Psalm 137:9, "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." Something has gone wrong. That must be an imperfect expression of the majesty of God. But I would want to be very careful with the one who does take the Bible literally. We had a baby-sitter once who was very fundamentalistic. She became a Jehovah's Witness later on. She would say to me, "Mr. Buechner, I will not allow my children to take the Salk vaccine because the Bible says you are not to eat blood, and everyone knows there is blood in the Salk vaccine. What do you think?" Part of me wanted to say that such a response was a travesty, and suggest that, of course, her children should have the Salk vaccine. But I always drew back from saying that, because I was afraid that if I destroyed that way of reading the Bible, I might destroy all sorts of other things. But I have always had the feeling that to take things literally may be closer to the truth than some of the more sophisticated ways of looking at the Bible. If you want to talk of being literally washed in the blood of the lamb, there is something in me that recoils from that. Yet, in another sense, I'd rather have that kind of language used as an expression of experience of Christ than whatever it might be watered down to.
DOOR: What does the Bible tell you about Jesus Christ?
BUECHNER: He's central. I mean, he's there even when he's not being talked about. I never felt that so much as I did while reading the book of Job, the other day- Christ in Job, the innocent sufferer. Christ is an enormously moving figure. I never cease to be moved to the roots of my being. (I'm even moved now thinking about him.) It is only his friends who make him boring. You'd think he'd grow stale after a while. Certainly, the Bible can grow stale, but I've never found him to grow stale. I've never been bored by him.
DOOR: Is the Bible primarily a book of rules, principles, and norms set down for us to follow?
BUECHNER: I don't feel that. At least that's not what I hear. To me, the most precious words of his are, "Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden." I can hardly speak those words without getting a lump in my throat. It is as though the Jesus that comes through to me is less a lawgiver, for all his giving of laws, than a speaker of a stern and loving word. What I hear is his great openness. What I experience is the opening up of a whole new range of possibilities. Jesus has the invitation. He's the inviter, the opener of doors. Falling back on biblical images, he opens the door, and a light floods through that you never dreamed possible.
DOOR: Your book Telling the Truth is subtitled The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Of course, the most intriguing part of that is your concept of the gospel as fairy tale. What do you mean?
BUECHNER: I mean the idea of preaching the gospel in all its preposterousness and not trying to water it down. The gospel does have many of the earmarks of a fairy tale. In fairy tales you have the poor boy who becomes rich, the leaden cabinet which turns out to have the treasure in it, the ugly duckling who turns out to be a swan, the frog who becomes a prince. Then we come to the gospel, where it's the Pharisees, the good ones, who turn out to be the villians. It's the whores and tax collectors who turn out to be the good ones. Just as in fairy tales, there is the impossible happy ending when Cinderella does marry the prince, and the ugly duckling is transformed into a swan, so Jesus is not, in the end, defeated. He rises again. In all these ways there is a kind of fairy tale quality to the gospel, with the extraordinary difference, of course, that this is the fairy tale that claims to be true. The difference is that this time it's not just a story being told- it's an event. It did happen! Here's a fairy tale come true.
DOOR: It seems that many of us have tried to squeeze the fairy-tale quality out of the gospel. We have taken the peace that passes understanding and made it the peace everyone can understand.
BUECHNER: One of the greatest temptations, of course, in trying to sell something is to put it in terms that people will find palatable and swallowable. To reduce it to something that others will find in their powers to believe. But maybe the best apologetics is to present the truth as it really is. Why not present the gospel in all its madness? Why not say things like, "Yes, you will be given your life back again. Yes, it doesn't end with death. Yes, the kingdom will come. Yes, Christ will come down from heaven." Maybe people are hungry for these wild and mad things which some preachers attempt to pull down to earth.
DOOR: How do we keep our eyes open to the fairy-tale quality of the gospel?
BUECHNER: There has always been a certain mystery to me about Jesus' saying that we must become like children. I think that is the answer to your question. A lot of what I'm trying to do as a preacher and writer is to reawaken the child in people. The child is the one who trusts. The child will at least go and look for the magic place. The child is the one who is not ashamed of not knowing the answers, because he's not expected to know the answers. Maybe this is part of calling the gospel a fairy tale. Who believes more in fairy tales than a child? Therefore, maybe we need to speak to the child in people, who can indeed believe.
DOOR: You are invited to speak to ministers a great deal. What do you tell them?
BUECHNER: I tell them that a minister has only two stories to tell. One is the story of Jesus. The other is his own story. Most ministers don't dare tell their own stories- the ups and downs, the darks and lights. In a sense, the two stories are the same story. The parallels are not exact... Jesus is tempted and resists; we are tempted and don't resist. Of course, all ministers draw some stories from their lives- what somebody said or something that happened, but I mean more than that. If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth (which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.) Many ministers agree that this is the way they should bear witness to their faith, but instead of drawing on their lives for truth, they draw on it only for anecdote.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Exec compensation
Am I alone in thinking that something is broken when it comes to CEO compensation in North America? In my mind it all comes down to “symmetry”. Let me elaborate. Let’s imagine that Mr. Johnson is the CEO of Advanced Technology Corp. , a mid-size public company based in the Northeastern U.S. Mr. Johnson’s salary is $500,000 and his bonus amounts to another 100% of salary and is tied to profit and working capital targets. Additionally, Mr. Johnson has a million stock options on his companies stock.
Last year he strongly supported and fought for a $10M investment to be made in company whose technology was deemed to be valuable to Advanced Technology Corp. About two years later that same partner had became insolvent and the $10M was completely written off. It was determined that the decision to make such a large investment in such a partner, in hindsight, looked very risky. The partner had developed an early stage technology in a nascent market and had close to no revenue at the time the investment was made. However, knowing this, Mr. Johnson had urged the Board to proceed and he was instrumental in the original investment being made.
During the same two years Advanced Technology Corp. business continued to grow and meet its operating profit targets. As a result, Johnson achieved his 100% bonus during the same year that his investment decision forced a $10M write-off.
What is wrong with this picture? In my mind, it is the lack of symmetry of outcomes and responsibility. If I can be rewarded for my good decisions, should I also not be hurt by my bad ones? I am anticipating a response from someone who would point out that Johnson could not know all the facts and felt he made competent decision when recommending the $10M investment, but that he cannot be held fully responsible for the outcome. Good point. But then I retort, are we also sure he is responsible for the outcome of continued achievement of good profits? You cannot have it both ways.
I suspect that we will all acknowledge the limits to designing a perfect compensation system. However, “symmetry” is not a bad place to start as a guiding principle.
Last year he strongly supported and fought for a $10M investment to be made in company whose technology was deemed to be valuable to Advanced Technology Corp. About two years later that same partner had became insolvent and the $10M was completely written off. It was determined that the decision to make such a large investment in such a partner, in hindsight, looked very risky. The partner had developed an early stage technology in a nascent market and had close to no revenue at the time the investment was made. However, knowing this, Mr. Johnson had urged the Board to proceed and he was instrumental in the original investment being made.
During the same two years Advanced Technology Corp. business continued to grow and meet its operating profit targets. As a result, Johnson achieved his 100% bonus during the same year that his investment decision forced a $10M write-off.
What is wrong with this picture? In my mind, it is the lack of symmetry of outcomes and responsibility. If I can be rewarded for my good decisions, should I also not be hurt by my bad ones? I am anticipating a response from someone who would point out that Johnson could not know all the facts and felt he made competent decision when recommending the $10M investment, but that he cannot be held fully responsible for the outcome. Good point. But then I retort, are we also sure he is responsible for the outcome of continued achievement of good profits? You cannot have it both ways.
I suspect that we will all acknowledge the limits to designing a perfect compensation system. However, “symmetry” is not a bad place to start as a guiding principle.
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