Say you own a company...

Say you're the owner of a large and sucessful company. Say you did really well, and had a whole lot of employees. And a HUGE annual budget, say, worth several billion dollars.

Now, in the daily operation of your company, you discover something rather disturbing. You discover that over the course of the last few years, hundreds of millions of dollars, your hard earned dollars, have gone missing. As you start digging, you discover that things are even worse than you first thought... some of this money has ended up going to the friends of several of your employees!

You call in an investigator, who finds several individuals who coroborate the details of what happened. Money was funneled from a little known project, to friends of your employees who were working on the project; of that, there is no doubt. So, naturally, you start to ask questions of your upper management. You want to know how on earth something like this could be missed.

So, you speak to your former CFO, who happens to now be your CEO. He's the one who signed the cheques... when you're talking about this amount of money, he must have noticed something. He claims to have seen nothing, heard nothing, known nothing, about any of this money. However, for some strange reason, some of his friends had also benefited from this fiasco. Coinciedence?

After all your months of digging, you've exposed a host of corrupt employees, and discovered where millions of missing dollars went; to their friends. Then, you discover that there is more... where does it end? An investigation is made into a company where some of your present CEO's friends work... and you're blocked at every turn. Some members of your staff, upon word that their jobs are at risk, spend billions on a short term corporate alliance with a rival company. Naturally, this should alarm you... they are, after all, using your money for their gain. You hold off on the pink slips for a while, and start to dig into more projects... and what's this? Your present CEO and his staff cancel another big multi-million dollar project that you've just begun to investigate. Why would they do that, you ask yourself?

All of this doesn't add up somehow. So, the question is, what do you do with these employees?

You have the power, and every right, to fire them all. The end of their contract is approaching, and you can decide whether or not not to renew it. There's another member of your Board of Directors who's equally qualified, and has proven himself capable; maybe you think he's a little wooden, but he knows his stuff... he's a former economist, and well versed in all the major issues your company is facing; he and his staff are ready to run the ship.

Your present CEO, fearful of being fired, calls a meeting. And he says "Trust me, I'll fix it."

Do you trust him, and renew his contract? Or do you fire him?


AUTHOR'S NOTE: Any parallels to any national situations or individuals is purely deliberate, and is intended to wake you up to the reality of the situation. But, ultimately, it's your company... you decide.