Comments on: Corporate Assassins

By: Corbet A. Sassin

Corbet A. Sassin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:34:47 +0000

Huh, funny you should mention that. How do you think I make my $.

By: Philip Nguyen

Philip Nguyen — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:40:47 +0000

One of the most common jobs written off as evil. Investing

By: Never Say it never happens

Never Say it never happens — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:55:23 +0000

Ever consider that maybe it happens all the time, but they use difficult to detect measures like drug or electrically induced “heart attacks.”

By: Terry Thorsen

Terry Thorsen — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:32:27 +0000

The best part of running a company is playing the game. Once you hit a certain net worth level it becomes less about the money and more about “winning”. So I think you’ll see the same breadth of behaviors among business leaders as you do in professional atheletes. “how far” someone will go to win is inversely related with their “need to win” (self-esteem). In this regard I think that business leaders and atheletes are somewhat self-selecting. These are high achievers by nature and are probably less likely to stoop to base behaviors (Tonya Harding/The Mafia being such examples in the sports/business world).

So, the satisfaction in running a business is in winning but as we all know there is little glory in winning when one cheats. I have to think that most business leaders will have realized this by the time they are running billion dollar companies. That said, I think that most individuals are willing to bend rules if they feel that the competition is already doing so. I think this is a slightly different psychology than the “everybody is doing it” justification that we hear about so often. I think it’s more of a rationalization. “I have to break the rules otherwise _insert rationalization_”.

By: Ryan Petersen

Ryan Petersen — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:02:52 +0000

I was thinking the same thing during John Chambers (CEO of Cisco) recent press conference in Second Life. I mean, there was the perfect opportunity for somebody to assassinate a competitor without even breaking the law. It would have really disrupted their press conference. You could leave a paper trail and gradually reveal more clues about who did it in a way that would lead to really cool publicity for your organization…

By: Mark Harrson

Mark Harrson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:40:33 +0000

A response to the comment by “hopefully anonymous”

> “Why do almost all white people refrain from checking “black” on college admissions applications?”

I don’t know, but here in the UK, a reasonable number of (white) criminals describe themselves as “black.”

This is because arresting officers have an obligation to allow the person arrested to make their own determination of ethnic origin on the arrest report.

I’m told (anecdotally, by contacts in the police, rather than with statistical rigor) that repeat criminals have learnt that describing themselves as “black” serves to confuse subsequent juries about the police witness statements, as in “Officer, you described my client as a Black man, about 25″ – how can this possibly be the man we now see before us?”

By: John Lucas

John Lucas — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:27:31 +0000

Is your basic premise actually right? Is the murder of businessmen less common than the murder of criminals and politicians (in countries where murder is common). A quick Google suggests that the number of businessmen assassinated in Russia (for example) is huge.

There may be a reporting bias as well – are Western media more interested in political murders in far away places than business murders in far away places?

By: Chip Overclock

Chip Overclock — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:33:12 +0000

1. Are there business domains in which killing your competitor is acceptable? If so, then we compare such domains with those in which it is unacceptable. E.g. Drug Cartels vs. Information Technology.

2. There is a military strategy that says it’s better to wound the other guy than kill him. Wounded soldiers require many more of the enemy’s resources than a dead soldier. So it’s better to force a competitor to “leave for personal reasons” than kill him outright: golden parachutes, etc. make a larger impact on your competitor than just forcing them to promote the successor.

3. Do unto others… killing your competitor would require a huge investment in personal security for yourself. (See #1.)

4. With sufficient resources, murder can be made to look like natural causes. So it happens more often than we know.

By: Joseph Logan

Joseph Logan — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:21:00 +0000

Accountant seems to be headed in the right direction. Milgram showed pretty convincingly that a tiny bit of distance and a tiny bit of coercion would breing reasonable people to do some fairly horrific acts. What would probably seal the deal? A blind vote.

By: Accountant

Accountant — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:31:00 +0000

If you put me in a room and told me that on command I would turn a key and kill 250,000 people, none of whom I have ever met or talked to and most of who I would probably like, I would more than likely not have a problem turning the key.

If you told me to take a gun and walk into the next room and kill someone I knew I would probably kill you.

You figure it out.