Its baffling to me how petty these executives got. You're an executive of a publicly traded company and your biggest concern is a couple running a blog?
They could have easily ignored them and no one would have noticed. Crazy.
One thing that's so easy to kind of mentally ignore is that every single person - politician, executive, or janitor is just another person like we all are. And that comes with good-sides and bad-sides of humanity.
Another similar example that struck a chord for me was the Snowden leaks showing the NSA were trading peoples nudes/sexual pics at work. [1] One of the biggest arguments people apathetic towards privacy make is something along 'the [e.g.] NSA doesn't care about your [e.g.] tits' - maybe true, maybe not - but the humans who actually make up this entity? Oh yes they most certainly do.
One would think that isn’t the kind of character flaw one would want to reveal to potential future employers. You admit that you can not be trusted with private information.
Stealing photos of people's private lives and passing them around isn't humorous. In some cases, such as teens at schools, it has caused the victims to commit suicide.
Even if you don't care if your photos were leaked, that doesn't give you a right to victimize others.
1) I didn't joke about that, but about being an NSA agent trading inappropriate pictures.
2) I agree that it's an obscene joke. My humor tends to the gallows and tends to get me in trouble, particularly with those who don't have one
3) but you know what's even more obscene? NSA's warrantless mass surveillance. NSA analysts trading pictures. A joke about it is not the thing.
4) That's an argument against literally any joke. To generalize your argument: "thing isn't funny because bad things happen". "It's not funny to joke about chickens crossing roads because unexpected animal crossings cause thousands of deaths every year!" That's you.
I think it calls into the question what the definition of success is, as an executive.
Plenty of these people are stumbling through their day with no meaningful contributions, and if the larger organization does okay, everyone assumes they're performing.
Plenty of managers and executives go off on some stupid tangent and actively harm the organizations they mange. Being a harmless kind of incompetent is worth something. Maybe not what these kinds of guys get paid, but still something.
You see this a lot in very rigid bureaucratic organizations where you "need" to have a body in the org chart because of the rules. The people who just bumble about harmlessly wind up managing things that don't need management, the box gets checked and everyone goes home happy.
> I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.
A "successful career" that our culture elevates as a path that will be good for you doesn't always fulfill the needs in your life that you truly are seeking. Usually that path doesn't even give you the space to figure that out.
You end up in a situation where your desires don't match your environment and trying to get whatever you're truly missing takes abhorrent shapes.
Great insight. There's no substitute for intrinsic motivation, and I've become more suspicious as I've gotten older of how business culture applies the "success" label over and over on stuff to entice people.
They could have easily ignored them and no one would have noticed. Crazy.