Enigin Reveal Highly-Paid But Useless Jobs III

December 10th, 2011 posted by enigin
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We encourage all Enigin Distributors and Enigin Partners to gather together a team that they work with closely, defining clear roles and dignifying them by allowing them the authority over their responsibilities.

Corporations often hire people to do jobs that don’t really need doing. Sometimes it’s because an executive is building an empire. Sometimes it’s the result of random corporate confusion.

Most of the time, these useless jobs pop up at the bottom of the food chain. However, some are executive positions that are both highly-paid and exist in almost every large firm - even though they’re not really accomplishing anything.

Over the next few posts is a list of the top 5 time-wasting and useless (but big money) corporate jobs. You may argue about the selection, of course, especially if your job is on my list:
Useless Job 3: Chief Ethics Officer

  • The Role: Responsible for assessing the ethical implications of the company’s activities, making recommendations regarding the company’s ethical policies, and disseminating that information to employees. They are theoretically interested in uncovering or preventing unethical and illegal actions.
  • Typically Reports To: CEO
  • Why It’s Useless: The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that right of corporations to be treated legally as individuals. However, if corporations really are individuals, they’re also sociopaths. Just as a sociopath will pretend to be nice in order to get what he wants, a corporation will pretend to be ethical, as long as it serves the needs of the stockholders. The only reason that most corporations don’t launch profitable ventures that end up killing children is that it might result in bad publicity. Period. Because corporations are always guided by a supreme sense of near-psychotic self-interest, there’s no need to pay somebody big bucks to publicly pretend otherwise.
  • Proof of Uselessness: If the role had any real meaning or power, you’d see Chief Ethics Officers (aka Chief Compliance Officers) being promoted into CFO, COO or CEO positions. But that never happens, a clear indication that the job is a sinecure. Truth is that the real C-level executives pretty must treat the Chief Ethics Officer as a joke and use it to make their “executive ranks” look a little less all-white and all-male.

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