UPDATE

Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have all announced layoffs in the thousands.

Do you all know what else they have in common?

All three of these investment banking companies’ CEOs made the Associated Press’ top ten highest-paid, head honcho list.

Last year, Merrill’s CEO John Thain made $83.1 million; Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein took home $54 million and Morgan Stanley’s John Mack brought in a hefty $41.7 million.

Clearly the financial sector is struggling.

This from Financial Week:

In April and May, financial services companies announced plans to cut a total of 39,000 jobs, the highest number since last August, when the credit crunch first started belting bank’s bottom lines, according to John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. So far this year, there have been 66,000 announced cuts in the financial services sector through the end of May—equal to 43% of the 153,000 layoffs recorded in all of 2007.

This means deep pain for all those workers who saw the financial world as a secure career. But obviously the pain isn’t being felt by the guys in the cushiest corner offices.

And we’re not just talking finance.

This from USA Today:

Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, (GM) announced this month the company had to close four plants that make trucks and SUVs because of lagging demand as fuel prices soar. That followed the posting of a $39 billion loss in 2007, a year when its stock price fell about 19%.

And Wagoner? His pay rose 64%, to $15.7 million.

This type of disparity always gets me scratching my head. What the heck were the board members of these companies thinking? They are the ones who decide to hand over buckets of money.

Isn’t this a good time for CEOs to at least look like they’re feeling some of the belt tightening? Seems more ethical, no?

UPDATE “When it comes to fairness, it looks bad and it is bad,” says business ethicist Jared Harris, about fat CEO pay at a time of cuts among the rank and file.

I’d like to know what you all feel about this. Do these lavish payouts for bigwigs undermine Corporate America and our society as a whole? Or is this just the way a free market should work?

Forbes just came out with their list of the highest paid women CEOs in the United States.

While these women saw their paychecks jump 13 percent last year, it made me sick to read there are still only 13 women among the 500 CEOs at this nation’s biggest companies.

13! That’s less than twenty.

13 women.

487 men.

That’s 2.6 percent.

This is pathetic!

Something is terribly wrong if women, after all these years, have barely been able to break the highest glass ceiling of them all.

Maybe we need to take a page from Norway. The government there told corporate bigwigs they had to include women on their boards or face being shut down.

I wrote about this last year:

The 500 companies listed on Norway’s stock exchange face being shut down unless they install women on their boards over the next two years in a radical initiative imposed by a government determined to help women break through the “glass ceiling”.

Norwegian companies face a two-year deadline to ensure that women hold 40% of the seats of each company listed on the Oslo bourse. New companies have to comply now with the rules and the government is considering extending the law to family-owned companies as well.

The requirement came into effect at the start of this year after companies were given two years to embrace the demands voluntarily following the passing of the law in 2003. State-owned companies are already obliged to comply and now have 45% female representation on their boards.

This makes sense. Corporations throughout the world have been run by men for years, and the Good Old Boys network that has developed will not be broken up without a fight. Yes, they’ll let a few token women — 13 in the U.S. it turns out — in to their little group, but why would they hand over power if they’re not forced to?

Look, it’s great to hear that Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, made $12.7 million last year, but most of the corporate riches for top dogs poured into the pockets of men.

While these bloated CEO paychecks also make me sick at a time when the average working stiff is struggling to make ends meet, I can’t help but think we may all benefit if there a few more of the so-called nurturing gender sitting on gold and running the corporate show in the corner office.

Workers need to get some backbone now!

I know, the economy is in the toilet but that doesn’t mean you should allow your managers to run roughshod over you.

Last week, I wrote about how bad bosses are getting even badder in this economy, and I was surprised at the emails I got from readers. They felt victimized by these jerks, and allowed their bosses’ behaviors to crush their spirits.

It made me realize that in some ways employees pump up bad bosses because we let them get a way with crummy behavior. I know, you don’t want to get fired. I don’t blame you. We all need our paychecks to keep our lifestyles going. But we also can’t roll over and allow a grown man or woman, who is our boss, to treat us like crap. We have our kids for that.

Come on people! Take back your dignity.

Ask for what you want — To be treated fairly and like a human being.

Now is the time to ask for things you’ve wanted. What about telecommuting? I’m speaking about that on a Grand Rapids radio station, WLHT, this morning.

Put together a plan and ask the bozo, aka your boss, to let you work from home a day or two a week. Or, if you have to be in the office, store, or plant, suggest working four ten-hour days, instead of five eight-hour days. Do you know how much money you’ll save on gas for just one day? Tons, or one-fifth of your gas bill.

This is also a good time to ask for a raise. Why? Because you chickens out there now have a great opening line…”Gas prices are killing me.”

They’re killing your boss too so he or she will understand. At least it’s harder for them to argue with you.

OK. Take a sip of that coffee and start the day empowered. No one should treat you like garbage. I don’t care how bad the economy is.

I can’t really finish that joke. Not in today’s uptight environment.

Heaven forbid I tell any joke, or laugh at a cartoon. (Yes, I did laugh when I got my last New Yorker with the Obamas on the cover. So sue me.)

We’re just too wound up today to tap into our humor vortex and it sucks for all of you grinding away in factories and offices, and especially those of you working outside this summer. We all need to laugh, especially in this economic environment. Lots of our great comedians came out of the Great Depression, the Marx brothers and Jack Benny. (Yes, Jack Benny. If you Gen Whatevers don’t know who the heck he is check out this YouTube video. This is what people thought was funny many moons ago.)

My column this week on MSNBC.com addresses the prevailing no-laugh zone in today’s workplaces.

I’ve already gotten tons of responses on the story, most of it from employees craving a more lighthearted 9 to 5.

I quoted Joel Goodman, director, The HUMOR Project, and he got lots of emails after my column came out.

One letter came from a reader who’s looking for a job. She took the initiative to use my column as a job-query ice breaker.

Here’s what she wrote Goodman:

“It’s so great to know that an organization like yours exists! In so many workplaces, there is such a huge need for humor. I’d LOVE to work in a fun workplace! I’d love to laugh at work! Surely there are many others thinking the same thing. Maybe I can help you carry your mission forward….”

I emailed Goodman to find out if he was even looking for workers.

I think this is a great example of being creative and pushy when it comes to your job search.

Take a lesson from this. Just sending your resumes into a technological bit box after researching jobs on Monster.com isn’t enough to make you stand out. Use any excuse to connect with a company.

In this case the excuse was humor. For you the excuse to connect might be an interesting project you know a company you’ve read about is working on, or you learned via LinkedIn or Facebook that a CEO has become a board member of a non profit you contribute to. Find an excuse, any excuse.

And, above all else, keep your humor people.

At one point in my career I got so many rejection letters that I joked about wallpapering my cramped Manhattan apartment I shared with a roommate with the paper repudiations. It was a tough time for me but my roomie and I decided to throw a potluck party, equipped with some gags such as roaches in ice and a whoopie cushion.

Did it help my mood? Damn right it did!

So, a rabbi, a priest and an imam walk into a bar and ask the bartender for directions to the nearest brothel. The bartender, a bit perplexed, couldn’t help himself and asked why these religious individuals wanted directions to a whore house.

Why? They all asked him.

OK. Now I want all of you to finish this joke for me. Tap into your funny bone and help me out here.

There’s an ongoing debate in the country over whether we need government to intervene sometimes in order to keep the nation’s businesses from screwing workers.

A debate over this was even sparked yesterday on this blog when I talked about the increase in minimum wage.

Well folks, unfortunately, we can’t rely on the business world to police itself. Money is involved. When that happens, men and women sometimes don’t do the right thing, and sometimes it’s more than a worker’s wallet that suffers. Sometimes it means death.

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration, or MSHA fined the operator of the Crandall Canyon Mine in Emery County, Utah, to the tune of $1.85 million for “violations that directly contributed to the deaths of six miners last year.”

Do you all remember the Crandall Canyon mine collapse. Not only did those six miners perish, but two mine employees and an inspector from the MSHA also died when they went in to help the men.

It was a tragic story and the CEO, Robert E. Murray, of the mine kept insisting it may have been an earthquake that led to the tragedy. I wrote about it a few times since then.

Turns out someone should have been policing Murray.

Crandall is operated by Genwal Resources Inc., which is owned by Murray Energy Corp.

This from the MSHA statement:

“MSHA’s investigation found that Genwal Resources recklessly failed to immediately report three previous coal outbursts that had occurred, two in March 2007 and one just three days before the August 6th accident,” said Richard E. Stickler, acting assistant secretary of labor for MSHA. “These reporting failures were critical, because they deprived MSHA of the information it needed to properly assess the operator’s mining plans. MSHA also found that the operator was taking more coal than allowed from the barrier pillars and the floor. This dangerously weakened the strength of the roof support.”

Here’s how the agency claims the company screwed up:

– The mine operator did not immediately contact MSHA after coal outbursts threw coal into the mine openings and disrupted regular mining activities for more than one hour on three separate occasions prior to the August 6 outburst.
The mine operator failed to propose revisions to the roof control plan when conditions (coal outbursts) clearly indicated that the plan was inadequate and miners were being exposed to dangerous conditions.
– The operator violated the approved roof control plan by removing coal that was required to support the roof.
The operator’s outside engineering firm failed to recommend safe mining methods and pillar/barrier dimensions, and the operator failed to maintain pillar dimensions that would effectively control coal outbursts.

Unfortunately, this is not an unfamiliar story.

Recently I wrote about the dramatic rise in cell tower climber deaths and how many speculated a rush to build out the cell system in the United States may have attributed to their deaths.

And a Wall Street Journal story today uncovers a huge jump in deaths in the steel industry and many believe pressure to meet exploding demand for steel may be the culprit.

We all hope that people do the right thing and not allow the greed factor to impact their decision making, especially when those decisions could hurt the very employees that are a big reason for their economic gains. But alas, hope is not enough.

Since I wrote my book, “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office”, I’m often asked — What makes successful CEOs and entrepreneurs different from the rest of us?

I’ve already talked a lot about how many of these overachievers were spanked as children. That seemed to get those most interest from the mass media.

But Jennifer Remling wanted to get beyond that. She started a project called “Carve Your Own Road” and has been traveling around the country trying to understand the entrepreneurial spirit. Her book on her journey comes out next year.

She asked me recently to do a webinar for her website, and the main theme was what successful people seem to have in common when it comes to their career approach.

Risk. Risk. Risk. That’s basically the overriding theme I’ve found when interviewing top executives and heavy weight entrepreneurs.

They weren’t afraid to take risks, even though they often had butterflies in their stomachs when it came to making career leaps.

Here’s a link to the webinar

One of the key discussion points was about asking for help. Yes. Many of these successful men and women asked for a lot of help on their climb to the top. The majority talked about the mentors they were lucky enough to be mentored by along the way. And I’m not talking about formalized mentoring programs that are now so prevalent in Corporate America. These were organically grown relationships.

A CEO for a major bank told me she used to pull up her chair to her manager’s desk and watch him work, asking him questions along the way. The CEO of a major retailer told me he stopped his retail idol in a fancy restaurant to introduce himself, and ended up in a long-term mentoring relationship with him.

It’s all about taking risks and learning from people that are smarter than you. Pretty simple.

There are lots of women studying to become doctors. And tons wanting to be lawyers. But, for some reason, women are not breaking down the doors of MBA programs dying to enroll.

Based on recent data, women made up nearly 50 percent of enrollment at law and medical schools, but only 27 percent of the pie in MBA programs.

Now, I want to preface this whole blog post by saying I’m not advocating women run out and get MBAs. I have written in the past about how an MBA isn’t always a guaranteed ticket to career success. But I think it is curious that more women are not pursuing this higher business degree, and in turn not ending up in the upper echelon of the business world, or the corporate world for that matter.

So what the heck is going on? Why aren’t more women pursuing an MBA?

I spoke with Elissa Ellis Sangster, executive director of the Forté Foundation, a group that promotes MBA and other forms of business education for women, and she had an earful to say about the matter.

“Young women really don’t understand what options there are in business,” she explains. It’s not all about Wall Street, she says, there are tons of options for savvy women who hold an MBA in their hands, everything from working for non profits to entrepreneurship.

The people in women’s “influencer set” - including family, friends, career counselors - tend not to steer females toward business, especially women who are initially all about liberal arts in college.

“For women,” she adds, “there’s a disconnect between the nurture idea and wanting to do something good, and the message they get from business. They see negative imagery out there. They see it as not contributing to society.”

HELLO GALS OUT THERE!!

Is anyone paying attention to the news? There’s a mortgage crisis going on in this country that was perpetuated by people in the business world, Wall Streeters and bankers, and, they were mainly men at the helm of this. I’m not bashing men here, it’s just the reality of who runs these organizations.

Tell me this mortgage mess has not impacted society profoundly.

OK, sorry, got off track a bit. Back to Ellis Sangster.

While she says an MBA or a career in business isn’t all about money, it is also all about money.

And what’s wrong with that? Money isn’t dirty. It can be used for great good if we want it to. But we won’t have any say in it being used for great good if we’re not in the business driver’s seat with men.

How come we think it’s odd for women to want money or to have control over money? This goes to the heart of why women are still making 75 cents on the dollar compared to men and why our numbers are dwindling in the corner office.

Look, an MBA is no guarantee that you’ll make it to the top, and Ellis Sangster agrees with that, but it will give you a boost of confidence in the workplace and it will shut up some of those lunkheads in the business world that already think you have a strike against you because you don’t have a penis.

I don’t want to sound cynical here, but there still is bias in the workplace and every female executive I’ve interviewed has experienced it. When you walk in the door of a new organization or a new division, an MBA will definitely give you that little boost of credibility because naysayers will at least know you committed yourself in some way to the business cause.

To help women think a bit harder about MBAs and business, the Forte Foundation holds forums with successful female MBA holders around the country, and they’ve also started going to campuses to talk to young girls about careers in business.

Parents also need to get involved and talk to their daughters about all types of careers without excluding the potential of a job in business, advises Ellis Sangster.

Interestingly enough, she often gets calls from dads wanting information on how their daughters can pursue an MBA. But the moms never call, she says.

Man, we have a long way to go.

I reprimanded my six-year-old son this morning because he did not flush the toilet.

The way I see it, this is one of the many building blocks I am giving him so he can go out and be a productive citizen some day.

“Flush the toilet.” “Don’t hit your sister with a Hot Wheel.” “Don’t lie.” “Don’t steal.” “Don’t send incriminating emails that could someday come back to haunt you.”

So what the heck did the parents of Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi teach them?

Tannin and Cioffi are two former hedge-fund managers for Bear Stearns were arrested today. Supposedly, these two men knew their fund was “toast” but they still painted a rosy picture of the funds to investors. Investors ended up losing $1.6 billion.

Here are photos of Tannin and Cioffi:

It’s not a new story. This type of scam has happened at other firms. We all remember Enron. Executives saying everything is okay when clearly everything is not.

This morning, disgusted with yet another one of these situations, I look back and wonder, how were these men raised? My mom would say, “they were raised by wolves.”

Since we know that’s not the case, I figured I’d ask an ethics expert on whether these acts point to something amiss in a person’s upbringing.

Am I nuts to even consider this?

“No,” James Otteson, professor of philosophy and economics at Yeshiva College in New York, assures me.

Children, he says, need to develop a “deep sense of how their actions affect other people.”

This is not natural for human beings, he explains, so parents have to keep drumming this into their kids’ head, making it a habit to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, along the lines of, “What does Johnny think when you do that?” “Imagine what Johnny would feel.”

Without this basic empathy building block, it’s easy for individuals to do bad things without thinking about how their actions will impact others.

When you combine this attitude with the general predatory environment in certain areas of the business world today, he says, you have a lethal combination.

These hedge fund managers and corporate executives are dealing with ridiculous amounts of money, so they may begin to see investors as “tools, or pieces on a chess board they’re just moving around.”

We need to all get in the habit of thinking every day how our actions trickle down. Remember the circle of yelling theory? When you yell the people you yell at end up yelling, and so on and so on and so on.

The alleged actions of Tannin and Cioffi may have indirectly hurt thousands of individuals who lost lots of money and are now struggling to keep their homes, their lifestyles.

They were also stupid, it seems. The two guys actually corresponded via email about how the fund was in crummy shape several days before they told investors they were “quite comfortable” with the fund’s stability.

What were they thinking?

For a moment I started thinking we should all be more philosophical every day.

But then I started researching Tannin and Cioffi’s background and found out that Tannin actually had this foundation.

He was a Preston Warren scholar in philosophy at Bucknell University many years ago before heading for Wall Street.

I’m not kidding folks.

Here’s a definition of the prize from the University’s website:

The W. Preston Warren Prize, endowed by friends in honor of Professor Warren, for 26 years a distinguished professor of philosophy at Bucknell, is awarded to that senior majoring in philosophy who shows the greatest achievement and promise in philosophy.

Unfortunately, it appears it was all promise and no achievement for Tannin.

I guess he never learned early on to flush the toilet.

For years my husband Andy has been telling me about his favorite TV show growing up, Ultraman.

I actually thought he made this character up because I had never heard of him. Turns out it never aired in New York City so I missed it, but it was big in the Philadelphia area, where my husband grew up.

Many times Andy described the character’s red suit and how he shot rays out of his hands, but, as you can imagine, this was difficult to visualize.

That is until recently, when Andy unearthed a YouTube video of his childhood hero.

Here it is:

This is the strangest and weirdest video, and the music, so corny. But when I watched this odd character on my computer screen I understood my husband better than I had before. Trust me, Ultraman says a lot about my husband and his personality.

So, I decided to ask some successful people what their favorite TV characters were growing up.

Why? Because I can. Just kidding.

I figured it might help all of us get a tiny glimpse into what has shaped motivated individuals.

OK, this is some of what I got:

“My favorite childhood show was the Jetsons because it inspired me to think about how technology might be used in the future to improve peoples’ lives. I also liked that George Jetson only worked 3 hours per day, 3 days per week, a lot less than most of us work now!”

– Dan Abelon,
 Founder of SpeedDate.com


“Pogo and his friends - because there was always a lot of wise-cracking and there never appeared to be parents around!!!”

–Charlie MacCormack, president and CEO of Save the Children

“My favorite show: Bozo’s Circus, the most popular show on Chicago’s WGN-TV.
Parents waited for years to get tickets to the show. I never got into the show, so I finally got tickets for my sons, wife and me 15 years ago. However, a crisis at work (Sears), kept me from attending with them. My younger son, Brad, was selected from the audience to play the “bucket game,” which he won. I was crushed on many levels. And the show was finally canceled about five years ago.”

–Ron Culp, managing director, Ketchum’s Midwest operations

“I was a young kid in South Africa, we did not have any television at all. It was the governments policy at the time not to allow television and it was only in the mid 70’s when I was about 20, that television was finally introduced. I well remember that we all sat glued to our newly bought television sets when the first broadcast was aired. It started with a single program at 8 pm every night and that was it. The program was ‘The Brady Bunch’ and that was the sum total of the programming for much of the first year. I remember watching the program with my family almost every night and it was the talk of the town, since there was no other TV programs to talk about.”

– Anthony Viderqauz, CEO of California Closets

“As a very teeny girl I always loved Wonder Woman. I’m not sure if it’s because as a child of Holocaust Survivors I loved that a woman could take on the evil Nazis, or if it was because Lynda Carter was such a mellow superhero- and always so well accessorized (I even mention that in my book!) Seriously, I joke about finding your superpowers but I think that I learned a lot from Wonder Woman about how to be a woman in business.
-Wonder Woman worked in a male dominated industry, and while most people underestimated her, she was always the one to save the day
-Wonder Woman understood the notion of sisterhood being powerful (um, guess she’d have had to coming from an island of women) and yet she was gracious and always appreciative of the strength of others
-She started out as a privileged princess and yet was able to carve out her niche in the professional world (with the career available to her during that era)
-Her superpowers very much reflected the intuition and skills attributed to women, only to the nth degree.”

–Rachel Weingarten, president of GTK Marketing Group and author of “Career and Corporate Cool”

Our role models do say something about us, acknowledges psychologist and career coach Debra Condren, who is also the author of “Ambition is Not a Dirty Word.” “But it’s just one piece,” she adds.

Since many of the business leaders today are in their 40s and 50s and grew up on shows like Superman and Wonder Woman, it will be interesting to see what the next few generations, brought up on Barney and Hanna Montana, bring to the world of business.

No matter who we connect with, these characters may be a good way of getting back to our “inner child,” explains Nancy D. O’Reilly, a clinical psychologist and founder of womenspeak.com. She suggests going back and remembering your childhood hero and even hanging a picture up to motivate you in your life today.

“We would all like to think of ourselves as either possessing or wishing to possess certain characteristics we see in these characters,” she explains.

Hmm. Where does that leave me?, I asked O’Reilly. I identified with Bugs Bunny.

“Bugs Bunny is cute and funny,” she answers, “but he can kind of be a pain in the butt.”

OK, I’ve revealed too much.

What was your favorite TV show character or superhero?

“Disgruntled.” That’s the label supporters of President Bush have put on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, whose new book exposes alleged dirty deeds by Bush and top White House officials.

The woman who holds McClellan’s position now, Dana Perino, was quoted saying the dreaded word, “disgruntled.”

One thing you learn early on when you enter the workforce is to be careful when dogging your former employer. This has been a piece of career advice that has been handed down from generation to generation.

McClellan probably isn’t worried about his future employability given his book is number one on Amazon today, but for the rest of us who can’t make a killing by writing a tell-all book, we need to think twice before we bitch about a past boss.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t expose illegal behavior, especially if someone can get hurt. But in this case, waiting until years after you leave a company to expose such behavior is unethical on your part as well. I’ve written before how employee themselves have to stand up for injustices they see, even if it means sacrificing your job. (If McClellan’s allegations are true, that Bush used propaganda to prop up an unjust war, then it seems he had a hand in the tragedy. No?)

But complaining about a former employer, especially to hiring managers that are interviewing you leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

I know, we’re human, and want to get things off our our chests, but restrain the urge to purge.