DISCLAIMER: This is not a knock on one company or a political statement, its a fact of business in the 21st century. Though each reader can most likely make personal inferences to situations they have seen in the course of their professional life.

No global corporate business structure today with stock holders is immune from what the quote above. The fact is that when companies take over other companies and so on and so on, you end up with accountants and lawyers running aspects of a company that they have no (pardon the pun)business running. They figure when they look at all the corporations under their umbrella that if Company A is run by a manager that makes $X a year, then Companies B, C & D, should also be run by managers that make the same. Even if before managers in Companies B, C & D made much more based on the value of their production and the idiosyncrasies of their line of work.

What I mean is that yes, bean counting, cost cutting measure are the bottom line for businesses in 2010, but the true financial hardship on large corporations today is that their boards are looking at management as a stop gap not as innovators.

CEO's are the no longer product of "the come up from the bottom to run the company" approach. They are more akin to the free agency contracts you see in the NFL and Baseball.

I have no input on engineering, congressional wordsmithing or oil production.