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>name is Dick
>CEO of a company called Layman Brothers
>massive Karen about his employees slinging dick and getting laid
What the FUCK was his problem?
I'd be weirded out and annoyed as hell to have a boss who were a fraction that invasive and controlling toward his employees' personal lives. Imagine if bro had channeled a bit of his managing-employees'-personal-lives energy into managing subprime MBS exposure.
Because guys who break their vows are just as likely to be diddling their employer. If they have no loyalty to their wife, why expect them to be any more loyal to you, and not be embezzling/selling corporate secrets/cheating on expenses, etc.?
It's "dishonest in a small thing is likely to be dishonest in a big thing".
Although I was obviously joking in the quoted part—the more I think about it, the more Fuld was indeed in the wrong.
It does not sound like he policed things such as gambling problems or household debt the same way he did affairs, factors that may be similarly predictive of disloyalty or corporate misconduct (and perhaps even more so). He could had easily warned executives about gambling or debt and asked wives to snitch about such things while he was at it.
It does sound like he was using his position to enact a personal view, in firing executives based on his sentimentality toward marital fidelity and/or sense of personal loyalty toward him. Many would say this is unethical, unlawful even—in breaching a director's fiduciary duty toward shareholders when it comes to maximizing shareholder benefit. And this is on top of the aforementioned weird intrusiveness into his employees’ personal lives.
Ultimately, it's a "just-so" story. One could similarly argue that male executives who have extramarital affairs are more valuable employees, as they have a Demonstrated Track Record in Leveraging Core Competencies to Think Outside the Box for Alternative Growth Opportunities.
Kind of like how some say negotiating an offer letter is bad because it makes you look difficult and not like a team-player. However, when in fact, employers tend to respect it when you negotiate the offer letter and often actually expect you to negotiate. If you'll fight for you, you'll fight for them. Indeed, except for my first job out of undergrad, I've negotiated every plausible-sounding offer letter, even for most jobs I didn't expect to take. This would include my current one.
Every bank I have worked for has a policy on employee gambling. It is policed, but it doesn't need to be policed noisily off trading floors because the sort of person who is at risk for problem gambling doesn't make a good banker. On trading floors it is mostly self-policed because all traders are gamblers, but all traders also know that a problem gambler is a shitty trader. Banks are also all over their senior employees' (and their wives') personal finances - they aren't explicitly looking for consumer debt problems, but I suspect they would notice.
Boards of Directors (as a matter of corporate law) and the CEOs they delegate to get a lot of discretion in how to be long-term greedy - the legal term is the Business Judgement Rule. If Fuld and the Board thought that creating a culture where the execs and their wives were part of a Lehman "family" (which he did - that Fuld ran retreats for execs' wives attracted a lot of bemused coverage after the bankruptcy) was the best way to align incentives at the top of a bank, they were absolutely allowed to do that. And part of that culture is prohibiting affairs.
Your just-so story sounds entirely plausible and a Silicon Valley startup which regularly needs to break laws or act immorally would probably do well to preferentially hire rakes, with Uber being the proof of concept. A bank is a different type of organisation and needs to have a more small-c conservative corporate culture.
On the merits, execs having mistresses creates conflicts of interest (particularly if the mistress is employed by the bank or a client) and avoidable complexity. I understand why banks would want to discourage it. Managing conflicts of interest is part of the core competency of a bank (for both client trust and regulatory reasons) and the simplest way to manage them is to avoid the ones that don't come with a profit opportunity. Allegedly (I am not senior enough for this to be visible at my level) banks don't like exec spouses having careers that could create the impression of a conflict of interest, and mistresses are more trouble for multiple reasons.
Personally, I favour the mafia rule for mid-to-senior employees of high-trust organisations - you can shag your wife or a whore, but shagging respectable women you are not married to is verboten.
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It's even worse than that. Cheating on your spouse is "dishonest in a big thing". When someone shows you that they have no integrity, you should pay attention and not just ignore that revelation about their character.
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You state this so confidently but you actually don't know what you are talking about.
Loyalty is not some single monolith that you either have in all areas of life or lack in all areas of life. It's surprisingly context dependent.
I disagree. If someone shows no loyalty to their spouse, someone they literally promised to stick by no matter what happens, I have zero expectation that they will show loyalty to me or anyone else. It is a huge character flaw to be disloyal to your spouse.
You disagree that loyalty is not a monolith...? Your expectations might be wrong or emotionally reasoned. The research shows something more nuanced. People compartmentalize. They can be loyal at work and disloyal to their spouse, or vice versa.
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"Shows no loyalty"--if this were true I'd agree with you. I'm not sold that extramarital sex is showing no loyalty. It's certainly a violation of trust, a breaking of a vow, to be discouraged, potentially soul-destroying, etc. And a full-blown affair where the dude is now in love with his mistress, that's an even more egregious violation. This gets down to whether you feel a man who supports his wife and family financially and (as much as possible) emotionally but has had illicit sex with another woman (once or more times) has therefore abdicated all his responsibilities to his wife and family. Arguably he has failed on one front only--granted potentially disastrously. But still one front.
This is similar to saying all lies are equal. Maybe they are. That if you tell any sort of lie, ever, of commission or omission, your pants are on fire. I find this oddly naïve as a view of the world. Possibly I've internalized more of Japanese cultural norms than I usually imagine.
Fair enough - "shows no loyalty" was too strong a phrasing. That said, I don't think my post substantively changes if it were to say "shows disloyalty". Sleeping around on your spouse is just about one of the worst things you can do to someone, short of criminal acts. I think it makes perfect sense to use that as a marker of character and act accordingly. It seems to me that not wanting to have an adulterer in a position of responsibility in your business is just another application of the ancient wisdom "bro, if she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you."
Is it? Maybe it is. I wouldn't react well, to be sure. I think in Japan, while marriage is certainly valued (my mother-in-law said to me 浮気したらだめでしょ the night I had proposed to her daugther. This means basically "Don't cheat on her.") at the same time the true fuckup is not the tryst with a hostess or whoever, but making it public, or bringing knowledge of this into the household. The disruption of the wa That's the dealbreaker. That's when you bring shame down on everyone.
Even then, if the mistress is employed as part of her job to woo the man (as in a hostess) in Japan this is not grounds for divorce for the woman--or at least the wife cannot receive monetary damages from the woman, as she would otherwise be able to do were the relationship seen as an emotional bond (as in the traditional mistress.) This is termed 枕営業 or makura eigyo (literally pillow work.) The idea, if I understand it, is that the interaction was transactional in a sense, and that there was no emotional bond. Interesting as well since prostitution is technically illegal in Japan (though rampant in probably any form you can imagine.)
Law in Japan is as slippery as it is elsewhere.
I realize you weren't talking about law itself, but morality. In Japan infidelity is in some sense seen as an inevitability at some point or another, by many. This is, like everything else, changing as society changes. Keep in mind there was never a real "sexual revolution" in Japan, as sex has always been one bin in the bento box, separate from everything else. You can get a fucking headache trying to figure out what's going on sometimes.
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„If I can save their marriage, I can save their mortgage“, thought Dick Fuld. It had been another long day. A lawyer had called, and a cop. The clock on the wall counted down the hours until another tranche defaulted. He lit another cigarette.
"AFFAIRS could be here" Dick thought, “We've never had our retreat at this resort before. There could be AFFAIRS anywhere." The cool air-conditioning felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE AFFAIRS" he thought. Sweet Dreams are Made of These reverberated his suite, making it pulsate even as the $900 wine circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of employee extramarital affairs after dark. "With enough leverage, your balance sheet can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.
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It's the Drake meme.
upper panel: screwing around on their wives
lower panel: screwing the market and causing a global recession
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