On 10th January I wrote “CEO Pay and Ugly Leadership“, referencing wise thinkers past and present and noting:
“Leadership where CEO pay keeps climbing to ever higher heights while average workers real pay has been dropping in the modern world for some time. Not beautiful. Ugly in fact.”
So a friend who read that post recently sent me show notes from an Old Vic production of Christmas Carol, so today I share thoughts from Charles Dickens on “fat cat” inequality. Oh, and these date from when? 1843. 175 years ago.
Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose, or the more it changes, the more it is the same thing.
From the Old Vic show notes of the current production of A Christmas Carol:
“In the spring of 1843, the 31-year-old Charles Dickens was…fretting over the state of the unequal society in which he lived and yearning to be able to bring about genuine social change in a world that seemed uncaring of those who were most in need of being cared for. When he was invited to attend a fundraising dinner in aid of the Charterhouse Square infirmary, which housed elderly, impoverished men, he hoped the evening would make a difference in the lives of the poor. Instead he found himself at a table of corpulent wealthy men, who had made their fortunes in the City of London and seemed unconcerned at the plight of those for whom the dinner was being held…his frustration with the world had been exacerbated, instead of relieved….he was desperate to write something that would help…he wanted to write something that would grab people’s attention, strike a “sledgehammer blow”.. and have “twenty thousand times the force” of a government pamphlet….Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843. Every Christmastime in newspapers all around the world can be found articles echoing Dickens’ words of 175 years ago, yet somehow the message still fails to get through to those in power.”
It saddens me to read this and be aware that income inequality is one of the major drivers of political disquiet and unrest around the world. I sit writing this in London at a time where Brexit is decimating confidence in the economy and, no matter the outcome politically, it will have a huge economic impact for years to come and hit hardest on those who can least afford it. Ugly indeed.
Yet, “awareness is the greatest agent for change”. so I am heartened to see growing awareness around the world of the impact of the huge swing in income inequality that has been happening since the ‘great divergence‘ began in the 1970s.
In fact, as you can see from this chart from the very recently published World Inequality Report, global wealth had been steadily becoming more evenly distributed since the time of Dickens until the last 30-40 years, with (and there are lots of charts in the report demonstrating this) ever increasing growth in “Fat cat” pay and wealth in the last decade since the global financial crisis, whilst at the same time the income and wealth of the bottom 50% has continued to drop.
When we “lead ugly” on issues such as income and wealth, the impact is both real and visceral, so it is no wonder that we see such polarised politics and extreme views and actions across the world.
I for one believe that one way in which #BeautifulLeadership can and will be modelled is to address income inequality, so I do call on CEOs and top executives to recognise that they have a key role to play, starting with their own pay.