There Are No Good Executives

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
—Napoleon

When this trope applies to a story, all businessmen are some variation of the Corrupt Corporate Executive. To them, swindling customers, abusing employees or even resorting to violence to eliminate threats to their wealth and power simply comes with the job. Or at least, if anything, it's a nice fringe benefit.

This trope can be Truth in Television, but just as likely not. While some businessmen are evil, deceptive, and depraved, it is extreme hyperbole to consider all of them to be so. Indeed, it is quite reasonable to argue that evil conduct is (in the long run) bad for a business; would you want to do business with a baby-eating, puppy-kicking psychopath?

At times, this trope overlaps with You Fail Economics Forever.

You may note that millionaire entrepreneurs do not always fall into this trope. These people are often depicted as independently wealthy Self Made Men who have wits and spirit enough to carve out their empires, and if not, they at least are in charge and take responsibility of them, tied to them in a way a king may be to his realm. Corporate executives, on the other hand, climb in an already established hierarchy, the leadership (thus also responsibility for any wrongdoing) of which is decentralised into some shadowy group, like "the board of directors"; going back to our feudal analogy, they would have more in common with court intriguers.

Examples of There Are No Good Executives include:

Comic Books

  • In The DCU, pretty much everyone except Bruce Wayne, and his CEO Lucius Fox, is villainous, from Lex Luthor to Morgan Edge, especially now that Ted Kord is dead.
    • Before the Crisis, Morgan Edge was arrogant and obnoxious, but certainly not evil, and he could even show a surprisingly decent side from time to time (refusing to cross a union's picket line, for instance). An evil clone once tried to frame him as being a minion of Darkseid, but Edge was proven innocent. Post-Crisis, the affiliation with Darkseid was declared real, and he is now really and truly evil.
    • Oliver Queen was also a subversion, but has gotten out of the game.
      • Oliver Queen now has an investment firm, but it's really only used to justify the sheer number of arrows he goes through (and the trick arrows, when the writer likes them).
      • This trope zig-zags when one of the Green Arrow reboots has Ollie regaining his lost fortune via selling short on arms companies after spreading market-panic-causing rumors about them, causing something called "The Gun Run Stock Market Crash". Although the writer might not have known that this tactic is called 'pump and dump' and, in real life, is hideously illegal.
    • Maxwell Lord, the CEO and founder of Justice League International, used to be a decent guy, albeit arrogant, but he's been retconned into a villain for no apparent reason.
    • Steve Dayton (aka Mento) is also a subversion. He's a genius with enough wealth to make Bruce Wayne look middle class. His periods as a bad guy have nothing to do with his money and everything to do with the fact that he has some nasty mental illness issues.
  • This is completely averted by Scrooge McDuck, of course. Is he a stern, demanding taskmaster? Sure. Is he a hard bargainer who doesn't suffer fools easily? You bet. Is he always ready to exploit whatever openings an opponent might leave him? Absolutely. Is he dishonest, corrupt, or evil like his Evil Counterpart Flintheart Glomgold? Not a chance.
    • ...Except for one chapter of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, where he Jumped Off the Slippery Slope because he got sick of being the aversion ("Why should I have to be the only honest man in this cockeyed world? ... Why can't I take shortcuts like everyone else? ... Who died and left me in charge of morals?!")
      • Considering that it got him a buttload of guilt and a zombie pursuer for several decades, he quickly learned to accept it.
    • Although it depends heavily on the quality of the writer, as some minor stories have him commit acts that would, under close (or not so close) scrutiny be considered theft, extortion and fraud. (Hint: Trying to claim a heritage for yourself when legally binding documents state that it belongs to your nephew is not legal.) Usually a sign that the writer Did Not Do the Research.
  • Over at Marvel, Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin is the poster child for this trope, along with many of Iron Man's enemies, like Justin Hammer and Obadiah Stane.

Fan Works

  • Subverted to a great extent in the Earth-2706 verse. In both the Ultimate Sleepwalker and Ultimate SpiderWoman: Change With the Light series, Corrupt Corporate Executives have expressed their hatred of their honest competitors. According to corrupt executives like Norman Osborn, the Honest Corporate Executives (people like Tony Stark, Brian Braddock, Warren Worthington and Marc Spector) are cowards who are holding the rest of them back. Guys like Stark and Worthington obviously enjoy the wealth and power that comes with their work, but at the end of the day they're really only interested in running their businesses. People like Osborn and Justin Hammer, on the other hand, actively believe that their wealth and power give them the right to lord over the lower classes and do whatever they want to them.

Film

  • J.K. Robertson in the movie Time Chasers was not at all deterred from proceeding on the Time Transport project, even after its inventor returned from a second visit to the future to reveal that the future had changed to one of anarchy as a result of the Time Transport being used as a weapon. In fact, he has the inventor and his love interest arrested, and later pursues them into the past, killing the love interest and murdering his own reluctant companion.
    • To be fair on the first score, he thought knowing about the future would enable him to prevent it (surely anarchy isn't good for business after all), which makes sense because the future had changed once already in the film.
      • Waitaminute, is this Time Chasers as in the MST3K film? Because if so ... well, that kind of explains any and every characterization fuckup fairly instantly...
  • Without exception, every single person on the corporate side of UBS in Network is an amoral, money-grubbing monster. The film ends with the main character being shot by a hitman hired by UBS, the voiceover stating that he was killed due to his show's failing ratings.
    • Even most of the Marxist terrorist gang are greedy capitalists! One of the main executives gives a speech about how Communist nations are run the same as large American corporations.
  • Tron: Legacy had an infamous scene with the Encom boardroom, where they're boasting about their latest and greatest operating system. The only subversion in the room points out that they're charging schools and non-profits a fortune - what are the customers getting in return? The idiot CEO shrugs and says "it has a 12 on the box..." This is meant to demonstrate that the company has fallen from its innovative times under Walter Gibbs and Flynn Sr. while cementing sympathy for Sam's annual practical joke.

Literature

  • Jennifer Government has two types of executives: bastards and John Nike.
  • Market Forces by Richard Morgan: Mega Corps effectively rule the world, funding wars, rebellions, and dictators for profit. There isn't even a mention of a middle class in the book, and the protagonist who starts off derisive of the whole "cowboy culture" of the Corrupt Corporate Executive becomes more corrupt and violent as the book goes on.
  • Peter F. Hamilton deliberately set out to invert this trope with Julia Evans, the young idealistic CEO of Event Horizon in his trilogy about psychic detective Greg Mandel. She keeps most of her industry in Britain to provide work and a strong economy (of course, this also increases Event Horizon's power and influence within Britain) and quashes potentially harmful technologies rather than make a profit from them.
  • The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth is pretty anvilistic about the role business interests played in various bloody African wars. The bitterness the mercenary protagonist feels over this is a major reason behind his Face Heel Turn at the end.
  • The Gone-Away World: It doesn't help that all the executives in question are actually ninjas.
  • "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," said Upton Sinclair, "when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
  • Common in Cyberpunk literature. Ironic, considering that Cyberpunk Mega Corp entities were based on the bureaucratic monoliths of 1950's America and the Zaibatsu Corporations (i.e. "preferred merchants") of Japan, which were anything but free market entities.
  • Averted, but not Inverted, in Atlas Shrugged; there are plenty of Corrupt Corporate Executive types (usually sucking up to their best buddy in government), but the protagonists are generally of the Self-Made Man variety of entrepreneur, and there are plenty of non-businessperson protagonists (Richard Halley being a musician, Hugh Akston being a professor of philosophy, etc.).
  • The Phantom of the Opera: In the original book by Gaston Leroux, this is the reason Erik (the eponymous phantom) could maintain his reign of terror: In Parisian society, it’s not what you do, it’s who you know. Therefore the executives at the Opera are not only corrupt, but Stupid Bosses who don’t care about how to do their jobs better and prefer to practice politics and be discreet with any problem, making them the perfect victims of Blackmail. The police are little better.

Live Action TV

  • Joss Whedon has no great love of corporations, either:
    • The most benevolent big business seen in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was Doublemeat Palace, and they were concealing something (albeit something relatively innocuous) from their customers.
    • Also on Buffy, the demise of the reptile demon Mokita led to bankruptcies and suicides among a few corporate executives as his magic failed them.
    • Angel, of course, revolved around Wolfram and Hart's villainy (though they were lawyers instead of industrialists) and regularly implied awful things about the firm's various corporate clients. (He even described season 5 as going from a small business to the morally gray environment of the corporate world.)
    • And then there's Firefly and the Blue Sun Corporation...
    • And then there's the Dollhouse with Rossum Corp. who provide daily mind rape services for the rich and the powerful, and that's the least corrupt thing they do.
  • The show Leverage pretty much runs on this trope. Half the episodes are about some evil executive(s) or entire corporations abusing their power.
    • There have been notable subversions - the president in "The Top Hat Job" seems to be a decent guy, and an executive is their client in "The Lonely Hearts Job".
    • One noteworthy thing is that the producer has pointed out that many of their villainous plots are toned down versions of real-life corporate scandals, because if they put the whole thing on-screen nobody would believe it.

Newspaper Comics

  • Dilbert, of course, although its viewpoint might be better described There Are No Good People.
    • One of the strip reprint books was titled I'm Not Anti-Business, I'm Anti-Idiot.

Tabletop Games

  • Shadowrun lives and breathes this trope, since the player characters are the tools the corrupt and supremely powerful Mega Corps use against each other.
    • Deconstructed with Horizon, a media and PR Mega Corp based out of Los Angeles. Ever since bursting onto the scene in the wake of Crash 2.0, Horizon has made its name as "the personable company". Employees are actively encouraged to be involved in community events, sports teams, and other personal projects. They are given handsome benefits and free time. The company's business practices are downright respectable compared to the strip mining and law shredding of other major MegaCorps. The online shadow community (which provides running commentary throughout the sourcebooks) has worked themselves into apoplectic fits trying to find some dirt on Horizon and coming up empty. Any dirt. There is absolutely nothing anywhere to suggest that Horizon is anything other than a personable, respectable company, but that fact is driving Shadowland to distraction, since there has to be something underhanded about them, and the fact that they can't find it is downright creepy. After a Shadowland hacker quit his job there and reported on his observations, Horizon's CEO emailed him to thank him for his service, offer him his job back anytime he'd like it, provide up-front answers on various questions the hacker had been looking into, and show his willingness to help him and "his friends" out however he can in the future. Creepy.
    • The Horizon tie-in fiction in the 20th Anniversary Version of the 4th edition core rules does show that Gary Cline, Horizon's CEO, is very likely a sociopath. Seeing as how when a former executive from a rival megacorporation burst into his office intending to kill Cline for ruining his career by getting the better of him in a business deal and took Cline's executive assistant hostage, Gary Cline's response was... to tell his assistant that Gary had been upset with the way his assistant had fumbled a recent project anyway, that he had outlived his usefulness, and Cline then killed his secretary himself. He then congratulated the gunman on his assertiveness and planning skills, and offered him a job with Horizon. The story vignette ends with the guy asking Cline if Horizon has a good vacation plan. And the professional-salesman's smile never left Gary's face the entire time.
    • And, the late 4e supplements such as Corporate Intrigue and Storm Front have made it abundantly plain that if Horizon ever was remotely decent at one time—a matter the writers went to some effort to cast into doubt—they definitely qualify for this trope now. Some highlights include:
      • Trying to score a PR victory vs. Aztechnology by hiring mercenaries to rescue prisoners from an Aztlan POW camp, and then massacre them themselves so as to blame the war crime on the Azzies. (Which in addition to being cartoonishly evil is also inexplicably stupid, as there's only about twenty billion or so genuine war crimes you could already blame Aztechnology for.)
      • Being caught secretly bribing politicians to pass harsher and more discriminatory laws vs. technomancers, a constituency that Horizon publicly supported from the beginning—because the worse life gets for technomancers, the more desperately they'll cling to their supposed 'benefactor' Horizon.
      • Having Horizon's first major social engineering triumph—the rehabilitation of Tir Tairngire after its post 3rd-edition regime change—retconned to be 'well, actually, we just created a Potemkin village, then secretly imprisoned and murdered every dissident who might have blown the deal'.
    • Basically, remember the big reveal with HYDRA in "Winter Soldier"?. Yeah, that's what they did to Horizon.

Real Life

  • If you're a socialist of some flavor, you may believe that all capitalism is inherently sociopathic (systemically evil, not individually, duh). Because of differences in aforementioned flavors, the socialist may differ in whether this means capitalism must be banned, or not personally practiced, or moderated with extensive ethical rules in a social democracy.
    • Even Karl Marx recognised that capitalism isn't entirely without value. He saw it as necessary transition from feudalism to socialism. Several other left-leaning thinkers have added the deal plenty of more shades of gray.
      • Indeed, Marx extensively praised capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. However, Marx's definition of capitalism was pretty broad and basically covered any economic system where machines and factories were the primary means of making more stuff, and said machines and factories were not collectively owned. This definition, in and of itself, doesn't actually require any corporations in the first place.
  • Also, one does not have to be anti-capitalist in order to subscribe to this trope. Joseph Schumpeter, a classically liberal (and hence pro–free-market) economist, believed that the corporate, bureaucratic economies (which were run on a mixture of Keynesianism and Corporate Statism, rather than laissez-faire free markets) of 1950s America were going to destroy free markets by strangling the Entrepreneur and the Innovator under a blanket of institutionalized stagnation.
  • More generally, this trope tends to be directed at big multinational corporations as opposed to smaller mom-and-pop stores or collectively owned co-ops. A recurring theme both in fiction and reality is that of large businesses and big-box stores like Wal-Mart wiping out smaller, more local economies and businesses. For all that the owner of the local restaurant or coffee shop is himself an entrepreneur, he tends to be depicted more positively than the owner of a large multinational firm.
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