It might be useful to consider that performance is relative, i.e. you and I may think a CEO drove their company into disaster, but in reality, the company might have been even worse off without that CEO. Also, most businesses fail. Plain and simple. Most new products fail. Plain and simple. This may not have so much to do with the leadership as with “the market” not being a predictable beast. So the “golden parachute” may simply be a way for to allow a qualified individual to still get paid compensation for a lot of hard work that ends in failure.
Maybe we should also consider why we pay unemployment to people who “lose their jobs” a.k.a. fail miserably. Sure, we don’t want to blame the workers who run the machines or the middle managers, but they also can fail at their jobs and then they get unemployment…WTF! (Difference in amount, true, but same point.)
