It is easy to point the finger at the CEOs and say, "you should have seen this coming." (In fact, I did that exact thing yesterday, check my comment history.) H

It is easy to point the finger at the CEOs and say, "you should have seen this coming." (In fact, I did that exact thing yesterday, check my comment history.) However, I don't think all of these choices were made in a vacuum. I suspect some of these started as 'suggestions' from the board/investors. I quoted that because it has the same connotation as a suggestion from your boss: power imbalances skew the optionality of it quite a bit. There seem to be some resemblances to religion here: the downturn indicates that the gods are angry, and must be appeased through sacrifices. The CEO acts as high priest, carrying out the sacrifice, absorbing the blame generated by it. That may seem like a far-fetched analogy, but there's a certain liturgy to the whole process. It illustrates the popularized image of CEO as fully-realized alpha male who answers to no one is naive at best. Almost everyone has to answer to someone. And that definitely impacts how they make decisions.